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\u2019s famous definition of metaphysical poetry. This book considers the circumstances behind Cowley\u2019s falling out of the canon and what he might offer future generations of readers discovering his poetry anew.<\/p>\n
Featuring nine chapters by a group of internationally renowned scholars, this book recovers Cowley\u2019s 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\u2019s famous definition of metaphysical poetry in the first place. What circumstances led to Cowley\u2019s sudden, precipitous fall? This book argues that Cowley\u2019s initial popularity and later fall in reputation have a similar origin: the experimental qualities, and the range, of his poetry. Cowley\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
TABLE OF CONTENTS
\nIntroduction | Michael Edson and Cedric D. Reverand II
\n1. \u201cWho Now Reads Cowley?\u201d: How a Major Poet Disappeared from the Canon | Cedric D. Reverand II
\n2. Ease, Confidence, Difficulty, and Grasshoppers: Abraham Cowley\u2019s Segmented Baroque | Kevin L. Cope
\n3. Sacred Calm: The Digressions of Cowley\u2019s Davideis<\/em> | Ian Calvert
\n4. \u201cVerse Loitring into Prose\u201d: Abraham Cowley\u2019s Prosimetric Ode | Joshua Swidzinski
\n5. Black Comedy and Futility: Cowley\u2019s Notes to Davideis<\/em> | Adam Rounce
\n6. \u201cMore Famous by His Pen than by His Sword\u201d: Weaponizing the Classics in Abraham Cowley\u2019s The Civil War<\/em> | Caroline Spearing
\n7. Cowley\u2019s Essays: Martial and the Ironies of Retirement | Michael Edson
\n8. Abraham Cowley\u2019s Six Books of Plants<\/em> and the Diversification of Textual Authority | Katarzyna Lecky
\n9. Cowley\u2019s Singularity: Pindaric Odes and Johnsonian Values | Philip Smallwood<\/p>","protected":false},"featured_media":4699,"template":"","subject":[36],"browse_by_series":[55],"browse_by_imprints":[],"conference":[],"class_list":["post-4693","books","type-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","subject-literature","browse_by_series-18th-century-moments"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/books\/4693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/books"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/books"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/books\/4693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4909,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/books\/4693\/revisions\/4909"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"subject","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/subject?post=4693"},{"taxonomy":"browse_by_series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/browse_by_series?post=4693"},{"taxonomy":"browse_by_imprints","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/browse_by_imprints?post=4693"},{"taxonomy":"conference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/conference?post=4693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}