COOPER William (Cowper William)

(1731-1800)
Born November 26, 1731 in Great Berkemstede (county of Hertfordshire) in the priest's family. After the death of a mother with six years went to local schools, ten years he was sent to London's Westminster School, where in 1749 ended his formal education. Prior to 1763, while living in London's Temple and haphazardly doing right, he continued to explore the ancient, as well as French, Italian and English literature. In 1763, Cooper suffered a terrible first period of insanity, until his death he suffered from bouts of melancholy and depression and not once tried to commit suicide. Darkness and horror of his life and work are balanced by a fine sense of comic and bright flashes of joy. This quality, as well as the ease and simplicity of harmonious prose Cooper certainly put him in a number of great masters of the epistolary genre of English literature.
Major poetic publications Cooper - Collections Olneyskie hymns (Olney Hymns, 1779) and Poems (Poems, 1782), written by a white verse poem challenge (The Task, 1785) of the 5200 lines, translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey (1791). In life and in the first third of the 19. he was considered the best poet of his generation, in particular because of his love for animals and nature and appreciating its humor, piety, and tender sensitivity. In the problem he combined all these properties with satire and morality and created a work that has become standard for several generations of didactic poetry. Poetry Cooper inherent muted, intimate, deeply personal tone. In satire, he tends to generalize and morality.

From Cooper Temple in 1763 was in a private psychiatric hospital. In 1765-1767 he lived in Huntingdon, then until 1795 - in Olnee, always under the care of friends. Since 1795, he was in Norfolk, where he died April 25, 1800.