Poetic injustice: blank-verse abolitionism and Cowper's The Task

The rise of abolitionist verse in the late 1780s coincided with the end of the period of dominance of the heroic couplet, which had by then been the preeminent literary form for the best part of 150 years. Taking as a case study William Cowper’s The Task of 1785—the poem of Cowper’s that gained him the attention of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787—this essay considers some of the reasons why heroic couplets came to be treated with suspicion by politicized poets at the end of the eighteenth century, and thinks through some of the affordances of blank verse, in particular, that marked it out as attractive to abolitionists like Cowper. Blank verse, I argue, served to fold the distance between “here” and “there” (between, for instance, a Britain free of enslavement and the centrality of enslavement in its colonies); it produced disordered images that undermined the ordering logic of colonialism; and it reflected the fundamental difference Cowper came to discern between social connections and what he came to call “incorporation”—the unnatural grouping together of men under the banners of commercial entities and enterprises.