The speaker in the major poems of William Cowper

"The fate of William Cowper as poet may very well turn out to be analogous to what threatened to be the fate of Samuel Johnson: the history of the man will become more important than his literary achievement. Of course the history of a man is the legitimate concern of biographers and all others primarily interested in biography, but when the literary critic, whose business should be to discuss literature, shifts his emphasis away from the work to the man behind it, he is no longer writing as a literary critic. What amounts to an indictment of Cowper as a poet is most obviously expressed by Gilbert Thomas: "All attempts to estimate his poetry merely as poetry, are futile; we cannot dissociate the poetry from the man" and Walter Bagehot: "Only a most pedantic critic would attempt to separate the criticism on Cowper's works from a narrative of his life. Indeed, such an attempt would be scarcely intelligible." The implication here is clear-- the poetry is not really worth discussing as being interesting in itself. These views are extreme, but they are not isolated examples. In one modified form or another they run through nearly all of the major critical studies of Cowper. For example, Norman Nicholson, a critic who has the most to say about Cowper's poetry, feels that since his poetry never "transcends the personality of the poet," part of our attention is always on the poet rather than on the poem: "to those who love Cowper, his poetry is a biography." Lord David Cecil, writing in an area somewhere between biography and criticism ("My purpose is . . . to tell straight-forwardly the story of this extraordinary man" ), finds that Cowper's poems are "not so good as the letters," which is another way of saying that the man is more interesting than his poetry."--Introduction.