William Cowper (1731-1800; pronounced "Cooper") was a contemporary of John Wesley and George Whitefield, leaders of the Evangelical Revival Movement in England and, as he grew up, embraced Whitefield's Calvinism rather than Wesley's Arminianism. Cowper's father was rector of the Church of England parish in Berkhampstead, Hertfordshire.

His mother died when he was six, and his father sent him to Dr Pittman's Boarding School. From 10 to 17, he attended Westminster Private School, within the precincts of Westminster Abbey. There he was well-educated, becoming a writer of hymns, a poet, a letter-writer, and a translator. However, for most of his adult years he led a troubled life, suffering a number of bouts of severe depression and spending a significant amount of time in asylums.

Cowper was a popular poet in his time, and one of the forerunners of the English Romantic Movement. At school, he learned French, Latin, and Greek to a sufficient standard to spend the last 50 years of his life translating Homer and Madame Guyon (1648-1712). The latter was a French mystic who was a proponent of "Quietism" — a Roman Catholic branch of theology that placed "contemplation" above "meditation" and whose followers devoted themselves to quiet prayer and to self-annihilation with a view to absorption of the soul into the Divine, and to withdrawal of the mind from worldly things.

Cowper became attracted to that philosophy. Consequently, when his father wanted him to practise law, and when he was apprenticed to a solicitor in 1749, he merely "dabbled" for the next 10 years. His heart was not in it.

In 1752, he experienced the first onset of deep depression. He began reading the poems of George Herbert (1593-1633), an Anglican priest, and a metaphysical and religious poet, and overcame his state of depression. It was also during this period (1749-1756) that he fell in love with his cousin, Theodora Cowper (who became the 'Delia' of his poems). They were engaged, but her father forbade the marriage, and the two never met again after 1756. She never married; but she did send him money when he needed it, and Cowper wrote 19 poems about or for her.

From 1759, things seemed to be looking better for Cowper. With his legal background and his father's influence, he was able to gain the position of Commissioner of Bankrupts in London. He left Olney and, in 1763, he was about to be made the Clerk of the House of Lords. However, under the stress of the coming examination, he had a second breakdown, making three attempts at suicide, and was removed by his brother from his lodgings to Dr Cotton's Asylum at St Albans. Cotton was both a poet and a Christian, and Cowper responded to him. Six months later, in 1764, Cowper found a Bible on a bench in the garden. He opened it at John 11, where Jesus raises of Lazarus from the dead. He also read Romans 3:25:

...(Jesus) whom God set forth to be a propitiation by his blood, to demonstrate the righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed.

He wrote of his conversion experience in his Memoir, an autobiographical account that also contained in-depth discussions of his innermost thoughts, and which was published in 1816, after his death. There he wrote of his conversion: "Immediately I received the strength to believe it, and the full beams of the Sun of Righteousness shone upon me."

From the middle of 1765, there were several people who became influential in Cowper's development as both a person and a poet. He left St Albans in June, and moved in with the Unwin family in Huntington. Mary Unwin and her husband, Morley, invited him into their home. Though only a few years older than Cowper, Mary (1724-­1796) became a mother-figure to him and, even though Morley Unwin died tragically from a fall from his horse in 1767, Cowper remained in her home as a permanent lodger.

John Newton (1726-1807) was curate at the church in Olney, close by the Unwin's home. He, too, had lost his mother at an early age. He sailed with his father, and became a slave trader, but was converted to Jesus Christ and, in 1764, God called him to the church in Olney.

There, Newton met Cowper, recognised his melancholic illness, and introduced him into the ministry of visitation in the church. They spent many hours together, walking and talking while Newton encouraged Cowper to agree to write a book of hymns with him. The result was The Olney Hymns which were published in July, 1779. It has been said that Newton wrote 208 of them (Amazing Grace is possibly the most famous today), and that Cowper wrote 68. The most well-known of Cowper's poems in the collection include:

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm

and:

There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Emmanuel's veins;
And sinners, plung'd beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains

and:

Oh! For a closer walk with God,
A calm and heav'nly frame;
A light to shine upon the road
That leads me to the Lamb!

Cowper's "melancholy" (depression) reappeared in 1773 when he was at Olney. He called it his "fatal dream", and saw it as an omen of his death. He seems to have been engaged to marry Mrs Unwin, but she broke off the engagement and married the Rev. Matthew Powley, which led to Cowper's third nervous breakdown. However, from the middle of 1765, as Cowper made repeated attempts at suicide, Newton stood by him. When Newton, in 1780, left Olney for a new parish in London, he maintained a friendship with Cowper by means of letters; and Cowper was able to leave Olney in 1786 after 18 years, and to move to Weston. However, in 1787, he experienced another nervous breakdown his fourth.

In 1785, Cowper published one of his major literary endeavours The Task — a 100-page poem in six books that set out to prove the virtues of rural retirement as against the imperfections of what he called the "active world". (He was indeed a precursor of the Romantics.) Over the next few years — from 1788 to 1790 — at Weston, he translated Homer's Odyssey, he revised his translation of the Iliad, and he wrote various poems. In 1791, he published his work on Homer (a second edition came out in 1793) and accepted an offer to translate Milton's poetry.

In that same year, Mrs Unwin suffered a paralysis which was followed by a second stroke in 1792. She later died in 1796.

From 1797, Cowper lived at East Dereham, Norfolk, where he continued to revise his work on Homer, completing it in 1799. He died there on April 25, 1800. So ended the earthly life of a sad man who wrote the most wonderful Christian poetry.