William Cowper's Wokeness

Abstract:Infatuated as he was with his news subscriptions, William Cowper would find in the morning papers all the evidence he needed to build a case against the Empire. Cowper's personal and public-facing writing returns continuously to matters of imperialism taken from the news yet, for all his furious denunciation of the Empire, there remains in Cowper's writing a sense of spiritual doubt that complicates a straight reading of the poet as conscientious objector. Referring to Frantz Fanon's and Paulo Freire's model of white double consciousness, this paper argues that Cowper's spiritual conflict is inherently a racial one, with the poet disassociated from self and country by sympathy for the colonized. The 18th-century newspaper, with its disparate array of anonymously penned articles written for and about the Empire, served as the quintessential voyeur to instigate the sort of culpability and shame that characterizes William Cowper's work.