2 - Poetry and Patronage

Summary

One of the more long-awaited social highlights of 1791 came from Elizabeth Montagu, the so-called ‘Queen of the Bluestockings’. Having spent ten years decorating the Portman Square mansion that she built after her husband's death, Montagu threw a breakfast party for ‘a numerous and splendid company of the Nobility, Foreign Ambassadours, illustrious Travellers, and Persons of Distinction’. With its James Stuart design and Angelica Kauffman murals, the house bore witness to Montagu's importance as a patron, particularly of gifted women.

Those of us who have laboured at home improvement for almost as long (although with rather less success) can only marvel at Montagu's dedication to the house beautiful. Our excuse will have to be our relative lack of resources. Having expertly managed her husband's business affairs while he was alive, Montagu inherited sole control of an estate that yielded an income of between £7,000 and £10,000 a year – enough to build and decorate the house without borrowing any money. This combination of wealth, artistic taste and social standing made Montagu an invaluable, if somewhat high-handed, contact for aspiring writers, intellectuals and politicians.

Even if he had been invited (which he wasn't), it's unlikely that William Cowper would have attended Montagu's opening. After the 1763 mental breakdown that led to his first suicide attempt, Cowper moved from London to an asylum in St Albans. Settling subsequently in Buckinghamshire, he walked, gardened, and wrote poetry that praised rural retirement at the expense of urban dissipation. (As one of his most famous lines put it, ‘God made the country, and man made the town’ (PWC ii, 136).) His accompanying self-portraits emphasized modesty, pain, isolation, and passivity; typical poems show him identifying with grasshoppers (PWC i, 256) and hares (PWC ii, 171), as well as with the ‘stricken deer’ that finds itself separated from the herd and pierced with arrows from the hunt (PWC ii, 165–6).

Cowper's sequestered life forms the surface pattern of his most influential poem, The Task (1785), which uses countryside vignettes to meditate on religion, culture and politics. Many of Cowper's shorter poems also celebrate rural domesticity. If we turn the tapestry over, however, we find that these nonmetropolitan scenes are underpinned by knotted threads of supplication and ambition.