William Cowper

William Cowper (1731–1800) was an English poet and hymn writer, the son of a Hertfordshire rector. Trained for the law, he suffered a breakdown before an examination for a clerkship in the House of Lords in 1763 and attempted suicide, and recurrent religious despair shadowed the rest of his life. He found refuge with the Unwin family at Olney, where he collaborated with the evangelical curate John Newton on the Olney Hymns. His poems of the 1780s, including The Task, The Diverting History of John Gilpin, made him the most popular poet of his generation, and his letters are among the finest in English.