Abraham
Cowley
born 1618, London
died July 28, 1667, Chertsey, Eng.
poet and essayist who wrote poetry of a
fanciful, decorous nature. He also adapted the
Pindaric ode to English verse.
Educated at Westminster school and the
University of Cambridge, where he became a
fellow, he was ejected in 1643 by the Parliament
during the Civil War and joined the royal court
at Oxford. He went abroad with the queen’s court
in 1645 as her cipher secretary and performed
various Royalist missions until his return to
England in 1656. Seemingly reconciled to the
Commonwealth, he did not receive much reward
after Charles II was restored in 1660 and
retired to Chertsey, where he engaged in
horticulture and wrote on the virtues of the
contemplative life.
Cowley tended to use grossly elaborate,
self-consciously poetic language that decorated,
rather than expressed, his feelings. In his
adolescence he wrote verse (Poeticall Blossomes,
1633, 1636, 1637) imitating the intricate rhyme
schemes of Edmund Spenser. In The Mistress
(1647, 1656) he exaggerated John Donne’s
“metaphysical wit”—jarring the reader’s
sensibilities by unexpectedly comparing quite
different things—into what later tastes felt was
fanciful poetic nonsense. His Pindarique Odes
(1656) try to reproduce the Latin poet’s
enthusiastic manner through lines of uneven
length and even more extravagant poetic
conceits.
Cowley also wrote an unfinished epic,
Davideis (1656). His stage comedy The Guardian
(1641, revised 1661) introduced the fop Puny,
who became a staple of Restoration comedy. As an
amateur man of science he promoted the Royal
Society, publishing A Proposition for the
Advancement of Experimental Philosophy (1661).
In his retirement he wrote sober, reflective
essays reminiscent of Montaigne.
Cowley is often considered a transitional
figure from the metaphysical poets to the
Augustan poets of the 18th century. He was
universally admired in his own day, but by 1737
Alexander Pope could write, justly: “Who now
reads Cowley?” Perhaps his most effective poem
is the elegy on the death of his friend and
fellow poet Richard Crashaw.
