1. The "warfare within" between the classical "happy man" and the Calvinistic introspective saint. from DLB

The Task closes... in irresolution...The poet's last review of his life in The Task is assertive but not glorious: to his sense of his uselessness in people's eyes he opposes the "fair example" of his patient privacy and humble strains. He concedes that he was "doom'd" to obscurity but sees it as a fate to be chosen fore its rewards; he knows that "in contemplation is his bliss" but recognizes a continuing "warfare...within." The classical "happy man" and the Puritan introspective saint shade perceptibly into the Romantic solitary, trying yet vulnerable, armed with the powers of creation and self-creation but endlessly threatened by uncertainty and despair(124-25)...The poem made the self, though cast out to the periphery of an antipathetic society and inhabiting a small corner of an infinite universe, not only an abiding center of attention in its own right but the bastion of moral, spiritual, and aesthetic value. What the concluding movement then brings into focus, however, is the less comforting seam of the same post-Enlightenment subjectivity: the promise of ceaseless mental struggle and incompleteness of which the closes analogue is the existentialism of Kierkegaard and Byron....In The Task Cowper had unwittingly produced a revolutionary work, a personalization of the Miltonic sublime from which Wordsworth's The Prelude(1850) and a whole poetry of nature and the private realm soon flowed(125). He was the first poet to articulate in depth and in his own character the anxieties and aspirations of the individual thrown back upon himself and his resources in the felt absence of a coherent living culture and inviolable framework of belief(134).

2. "William Cowper: State, Society, and Countryside." in Nature and Society: Later Eighteenth-Century Uses of the Pastoral and Georgic 121-53. by Richard Feingold(1978)

In Cowper's work retirement is presented finally as an option, not as the emblem of a psychological moment of positive political significance, as, for example, in Pope's Epistle to Burlington, where the experience of rural pleasure is intrinsically linked to the poem's vision of a good public and political order...In The Task retirement is no longer a poetical idea working as a catalyst to resolve the strains between nature and art inside a poem and inside the mind experiencing the poem. Instead, it serves as a suburban option signifying a failure to resolve the antinomy between nature and art in a poem, and of the poet's need to escape, to isolate himself from the battleground of nature and art in life in order to comprehend nature morally as a creature of grace. The world of art is, in the end, left outside of the realm of redemption(253).

3. "Redefining Georgic: Cowper's Task" ELH 57-4(winter 1990): 865-79 by Dustin Griffin.

One traditional boundary, for example, is that which separates georgic from pastoral. For Virgil there was a clear distinction between the two forms, and we can be reasonably certain that the distinction survived among Renaissance English pastoralists, and among the translators of Virgil, including Dryden...Pastoral traditionally concerns the relatively carefree world of shepherds, exemplars of the world of leisure or otium. The pastoral figure's object is pleasure, and this essentially pagan element has to be de-emphasized when the form is taken over by Christian writers. Georgic, on the other hand, concerns the more active world of farming, and the life of negotium, employment, occupation, work. In some respects georgic lends itself better than pastoral to Christian uses, since it shares with Christianity a high valuation of purposive labor... if we think of georgic since Virgil as a poem concerned above all with the value of work, we may have a useful way of seeing the wholeness of a poem that Cowper tellingly entitled The Task...in describing The Task, I argue that the georgic spirit is the presiding principle of his poem. I suggest further that Cowper went back to Virgil's own Georgics, though his use of the poem is critical rather than reverential, and in some cases even corrective. One means of correcting Virgil is to look to a higher authority—the Bible—and to draw into his poem, by means of subtle allusion, the Christianized georgic world of Milton(291).

Cowper's implicit claim that as poet he “serves… the state” springs from his grafting of Horace onto Virgil's georgic. Horace in the Epistle to Augustus had argued that the poet “serves the state.” In Cowper's hands Horace's poet, the retired man (from Horatian tradition), and Virgil's farmer blend into one exemplary figure. But the link between private labor and public good is far less realized than in Virgil. Cowper's retired man is not a producer of food, a dispenser of laws, or a guarantor of liberty...He may indeed appear to others to be only an “incumbrance on the state, /Receiving benefits, and rend'ring none” (6.958-59). Yet the retired man serves his country...And the “state” which Cowper's retired man “recompenses” turns out not to be the civil power at all. It is a higher power, “the state, beneath the shadow of whose vine / He sits secure” (6.969-70). Cowper invokes another georgic metaphor (Tityrus sits under the cover or protective shade of a beech tree at the end of the Georgics), but its strongest associations are biblical rather than Virgilian(259)

The Task emerges from Feingold's analysis as a poem which finds bucolic topics unable to express and apprehend the modern state, almost an anti-georgic. I have tried to suggest, on the other hand, that the poem has a clear georgic design. By redefining labor—with help from the Bible and from Milton—as a virtually spiritual activity, and shifting his attention from the public sphere to the private, Cowper reaffirms, though he significantly modifies, the traditional georgic values of steady dedication to a homely and unspectacular task. And his poetry—quietly allusive, soberly witty, temperately fervent—embodies those values(295).

4. "William Cowper's Rhetoric: The Picturesque and the Personal" in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 19-3(Summer 1979) 515-31 by Joseph F. Musser, Jr.

Cowper’s own “advertisement" to The Task reveals that he considers the source of the unity to be the poet himself, not the dictates of the material...He says that he has pursued “the train of thought to which his situation and turn of mind led him" (Poems, p. 128). The “situation" might be taken to include the physical, mental, emotional, and psychological environment; “turn of mind" allows for the influence of peculiar associations and habits of thought. (One is reminded of the wanderer through a picturesque landscape.) Both indicate that the unifying factor is in the poet, or the narrator: our awareness of his personality must hold the work together(524).

At the end of The Task, then, we see a man interested most in his relation with various possible audiences, concerned that he be accepted by all of them. We are distracted from his purported subjects describing the sofa, reproving the degeneracy of the times, and celebrating immortal truth-because his self- consciousness prevents his becoming absorbed in those subjects. The combination of homiletic and confessional rhetoric creates a rhetoric of engagement-of the picturesque- that encourages his audience to heal the dissociation between his experiencing ego and his self-observing ego. Along with Cowper himself, we watch the warfare within and seek reconciliation. In other words, the rhetoric that results from combining the intent to preach with the desire to confess encourages an active response: to attempt to discover the integrity Cowper himself does not, and presumably cannot, provide. Like the picturesque landscape artist, Cowper tries to “produce an effect of a whole" by distinguishing the parts and relying on the audience to perceive the “harmony" that allows “the whole / [to be] felt." That he does not always succeed in conveying sufficient harmony frequently drives critics to his biography, which may in fact be the ultimate goal of his rhetoric: to encourage his readers to try to find an integrity that he never seemed sure of(530-31).

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