The Complete Poetical Works of William Cowper (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Complete Poetical Works of William Cowper The dates at which most of the poems were composed are fairly certain; nor have the new facts displayed by Mr. Wright in his Life of Cowper(1892) and Correspondence of Cowper (1904) much disturbed the traditional order. But a search through various magazines and periodicals of the time, especially The Gentleman's Magazine, has enabled me to give earlier dates than have hitherto been known for the first publication of many of the miscellaneous poems and the first published version often shows a large number of variations from later versions. I cannot hope to have traced all these early versions an exhaustive search through the files of the Northampton Mercury, General Evening Post, and other papers not easily accessible, would be necessary for this. But the copies disinterred by previous editors and by myself supply ample evidence of the constant minute alterations made by Cowper in his least important poems; and this is the main interest of the early versions and the variants they supply for the various readings are often intrinsically of equal value: the alteration has produced no improvement. Consideration of this point leads naturally to the ques tion of the text. It is 111 the constitution and presenta tion of the text that I hope to have made some advance on my predecessors. I have not, of course, attempted to chronicle all the misprints of all the early editions, or all the aberrations of Hayley and other editors; such a chronicle would serve no useful purpose and would take up an intolerable deal of space. But in the editions of the poems printed in Goer's lifetime all variants which indicate a difference of reading have been noted: where two editors - Croft and Hayley, or Johnson and Hayley - of equal or nearly equal author ity, print different versions of posthumous poems, one version has been followed throughout the poem, the variants from the other being placed in the notes: and, as already stated, readings involving verbal changes from early printed or ms. Copies are given either in the foot notes or at the end of the volume. Thus an attempt has for the first time been made to supply a sufficiently full critical apparatus 1. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.