Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)

A Seventeenth-Century English Poet Recovered

Edited by Michael Edson and Cedric D. Reverand II

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When Cowley died, he was the most famous poet in England. His popularity continued throughout the eighteenth century. Yet Cowley has virtually disappeared from the canon today, even from metaphysical poetry collections, although it was Cowley who occasioned Samuel Johnson’s famous definition of metaphysical poetry. This book considers the circumstances behind Cowley’s falling out of the canon and what he might offer future generations of readers discovering his poetry anew.

Featuring nine chapters by a group of internationally renowned scholars, this book recovers Cowley’s unique achievement as a poet working across and between the genres and disciplines of his time and of our own. When Cowley died, he was the most famous poet in England, and his popularity continued throughout the eighteenth century; for instance, he was much more widely published than Donne, Herbert, Marvell, or Crashaw. Yet Cowley has virtually disappeared from the canon today, even from collections of metaphysical poetry, although it was Cowley who occasioned Samuel Johnson’s famous definition of metaphysical poetry in the first place. What circumstances led to Cowley’s sudden, precipitous fall? This book argues that Cowley’s initial popularity and later fall in reputation have a similar origin: the experimental qualities, and the range, of his poetry. Cowley’s works bridge disciplines (science, poetry), modes (prose, verse), and genres (lyric, ode, epic) in unexpected ways. The same mixed, eccentric, digressive, and unfinished qualities that endeared Cowley’s poetry to his contemporaries doomed his reputation for later readers unable to deal with his idiosyncratic style and defiance of recognized categories. Arguing that he mixed neoclassical and baroque, metaphysical and baroque, cavalier and metaphysical, poetry and prose, epic and history, science and verse, the contributors to this book reveal Cowley as a kaleidoscopic mind whose challenging writings fell between established categories and therefore fell through the cracks of literary history.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction | Michael Edson and Cedric D. Reverand II
1. “Who Now Reads Cowley?”: How a Major Poet Disappeared from the Canon | Cedric D. Reverand II
2. Ease, Confidence, Difficulty, and Grasshoppers: Abraham Cowley’s Segmented Baroque | Kevin L. Cope
3. Sacred Calm: The Digressions of Cowley’s Davideis | Ian Calvert
4. “Verse Loitring into Prose”: Abraham Cowley’s Prosimetric Ode | Joshua Swidzinski
5. Black Comedy and Futility: Cowley’s Notes to Davideis | Adam Rounce
6. “More Famous by His Pen than by His Sword”: Weaponizing the Classics in Abraham Cowley’s The Civil War | Caroline Spearing
7. Cowley’s Essays: Martial and the Ironies of Retirement | Michael Edson
8. Abraham Cowley’s Six Books of Plants and the Diversification of Textual Authority | Katarzyna Lecky
9. Cowley’s Singularity: Pindaric Odes and Johnsonian Values | Philip Smallwood

About the Editors

Michael Edson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wyoming and associate editor of Eighteenth-Century Life. His articles have appeared in Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Eighteenth Century, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. His edited book, Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Lehigh University Press), appeared in 2017. He is currently working on a book about error and ignorance in the reading of topical satire.

Cedric Reverand, George Duke Humphrey Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Wyoming, specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature. He has published extensively in that area, especially on Dryden and Pope, but also on art, architecture, and music. He is currently the general editor of Eighteenth-Century Life.