Paranoia, Diversion, and Semblance in William Cowper

Abstract This study shows how eighteenth-century reading practices—the intensive reading of a classical and religious canon, paired with extensive reading in ephemeral and contemporary print—shaped the expression of William Cowper’s lifelong melancholy and religious despair. In his periods of depression, Cowper was a paranoid reader, unable to read without applying texts to himself. In times of recovery, he used reading as diversion, carefully distancing himself psychologically from the contemporary and classical books he read and translated. In his most successful poetry, however, Cowper took the question of resemblance as a topic of poetic investigation, depicting his own mind without falling into despairing paranoia.