69-) English Literature

69- ) English Literature

Abraham Cowley

Abraham Cowley (/ˈkuːli/; born 1618, London—died July 28, 1667, Chertsey, Eng.) born in the City of London late in 1618 was an English poet and essayist who wrote poetry of a fanciful, decorous nature. He was one of the leading English poets of the 17th century, with 14 printings of his Works published between 1668 and 1721. He also adapted the Pindaric ode to English verse.

Early life and career

Born in 1618 in London, England poet and essayist Abraham Cowley was one of the most popular and influential artists of the 17th Century. From a well to do family, his father died when Cowley was still a boy. Cowley's father, a wealthy Londoner, who died shortly before his birth, was a stationer. His mother was wholly given to works of devotion, but it happened that there lay in her parlour a copy of The Faerie Queene. This became the favourite reading of her son, and he had read it twice before he was sent to school.

At that early age he became immersed in literature and was particularly fond of the populist work The Faerie Queene written by Edmund Spenser.He displayed early talent as a poet, publishing his first collection of poetry, Poetical Blossoms (1633), at the age of 15. Cowley studied at Cambridge University but was stripped of his Cambridge fellowship during the English Civil War and expelled for refusing to sign the Solemn League and Covenant of 1644. In turn, he accompanied Queen Henrietta Maria to France, where he spent 12 years in exile serving as her secretary. During this time, Cowley completed The Mistress (1647). Arguably his most famous work, the collection exemplifies Cowley’s metaphysical style of love poetry. After the Restoration, Cowley returned to England, where he was reinstated as a Cambridge fellow and earned his MD before finally retiring to the English countryside. He is buried at Westminster Abbey alongside Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser.

Cowley was writing by the time he was just ten years old and completed his first epic poem at that age. The Tragicall History of Piramus and Thisbe was considered very mature for someone of his age and marked the beginning of a prolific career as a poet. Two years later he produced Constantia and Philetus at the same time as he was attending school in Westminster. He was a talented and inquiring student and had achieved a certain amount of fame by the time he was fifteen.

He wrote a comedy Love’s Riddle when he was sixteen, was accepted into Cambridge in 1637 and began working on an epic about King David before he had left his studies. As the prospect of Civil War began to spread its dark veil across the country, Cowley, a distinct Royalist, wrote a play for Charles I which was considered a great success and was regularly performed in secret in Dublin after war broke out.

Cowley had become a fellow at Cambridge at the time of the war but was thrown out by the new Parliamentarians. He moved to Oxford and became firm friends with Lord Falkland which led to him being an integral part of the Royal court. He spent 12 years in exile in Paris with the Queen but royal service also saw him undertaking various precarious trips in aid of the King’s cause. He developed complex ciphers to ensure that the King and Queen could communicate with each other in secrecy.

Cowley continued to write poetry however, despite being surrounded by the turmoil and aftermath of war, beginning a description of the Civil War and writing the collection Poems that was published in 1656. His fame also continued to grow and when he finally returned to England he was without peer in the whole of England. His poem The Mistress became one of the most popular verses at the time. It wasn’t until the restoration of the monarchy in 1662, following the death of Cromwell, that it was safe to return to England.

A year after the Restoration, he published the work Verses upon several occasions and retired to the country, living in Chertsey and living in quiet solitude, studying plants and writing verses. This was a period of great scientific advances and Cowley in part devoted himself to promoting the case for an academy of science which shortly after became The Royal Society.

In 1667, whilst at his home in Chertsey, Cowley caught what appeared to be a cold but quickly became more ill, dying a little while after. He was buried alongside Chaucer and Spenser in Westminster Abbey.

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.

As early as 1628, when he was only ten years old, he composed his Tragicall Historie of Piramus and Thisbe, an epic romance written in a six-line stanza, a style of his own invention. It has been considered to be a most astonishing feat of imaginative precocity; it is marked by no great faults of immaturity, and possesses constructive merits of a very high order. Two years later, Cowley wrote another and still more ambitious poem, Constantia and Philetus; around this time he was sent to Westminster School. At Westminster he displayed extraordinary mental precocity and versatility, writing when he was just thirteen the Elegy on the Death of Dudley, Lord Carlton. These three lengthy poems, and some smaller ones, were collected in 1633, and published in a volume entitled Poeticall Blossomes, dedicated to Lambert Osbaldeston, the headmaster of the school, and prefaced by many laudatory verses by schoolfellows.

Cowley at once became famous, although he was only fifteen years old. His next composition was a pastoral comedy, entitled Loves Riddle, a marvellous production for a boy of sixteen, airy, correct and harmonious in language, and rapid in movement. The style is not without resemblance to that of the poet Thomas Randolph, whose earliest works had only just been printed.

In 1637 Cowley went up to Trinity College, Cambridge,[4] where he "betook himself with enthusiasm to the study of all kinds of learning, and early distinguished himself as a ripe scholar". Portraits of Cowley, attributed to William Faithorne and Stephen Slaughter, are in Trinity College's collection. It was about this time that he composed his scriptural epic on the history of King David, one book of which still exists in the Latin original. An English version of the epic in four books, called the Davideis, was published after his death. The epic deals with the adventures of King David from his boyhood to the smiting of Amalek by Saul, where it abruptly closes.

In 1638 Loves Riddle and a Latin comedy, the Naufragium Joculare, were printed, and in 1641 the passage of Prince Charles (later to be King Charles II) through Cambridge led to the production of another dramatic work, The Guardian, which was performed before the royal visitor with much success. During the civil war this play was privately performed at Dublin, but it was not printed till 1650. It is bright and amusing, in the style common to the "sons" of Ben Jonson, the university wits who wrote more for the closet than the public stage.

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.

Royalist in exile

The learned quiet of the young poet's life was disrupted by the Civil War in 1642 as he warmly espoused the royalist side. He became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, but was ejected by the Parliamentarians in 1643. He made his way to Oxford, where he enjoyed the friendship of Lord Falkland, and gained the personal confidence of the royal family. Around this time, he published two anti-Puritan satires: A Satyre Against Separatists (attribution sometimes disputed), printed in 1642, and The Puritan and the Papist (1643).

After the Battle of Marston Moor he followed the queen to Paris, where his exile lasted twelve years. This period was spent almost entirely in the royal service, "bearing a share in the distresses of the royal family, or labouring in their affairs. To this purpose he performed several dangerous journeys into Jersey, Scotland, Flanders, the Netherlands, or wherever else the king's troubles required his attendance. But the chief testimony of his fidelity was the laborious service he underwent in maintaining the constant correspondence between the late king and the queen his wife. In that weighty trust he behaved himself with indefatigable integrity and unsuspected secrecy; for he ciphered and deciphered with his own hand the greatest part of all the letters that passed between their majesties, and managed a vast intelligence in many other parts, which for some years together took up all his days, and two or three nights every week."

In spite of these labours he did not refrain from writing. During his exile he became familiar with the works of Pindar, and determined to reproduce their lofty lyric passion in English. However, Cowley misunderstood Pindar's metrical practice and therefore his reproduction of the Pindaric ode form in English did not accurately reflect Pindar's poetics. But despite this problem, Cowley's use of iambic lines of irregular length, pattern, and rhyme scheme was very influential and these type of odes are still known in English as Pindarics, Irregular Odes or Cowleyan Odes. Some of the most famous odes written after Cowley in the Pindaric tradition are Coleridge's "Ode on the Departing Year" and Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality".

During his exile, Cowley wrote a history of the Civil War (which did not get published in full until 1973). In the preface to his 1656 Poems, Cowley mentioned that he had completed three books of an epic poem on the Civil War, but had left it unfinished after the First Battle of Newbury when the Royalist cause began to lose significant ground. In the preface, Cowley indicated that he had destroyed all copies of the poem, but this was not precisely the truth. In 1679, twelve years after Cowley's death, a shortened version of the first book of the poem, called A Poem on the Late Civil War was published. It was assumed that the rest of the poem had indeed been destroyed or lost until the mid-20th century when scholar Allan Pritchard discovered the first of two extant manuscript copies of the whole poem among the Cowper family papers. Thus, the three completed books of Cowley's great (albeit unfinished) English epic, The Civill Warre (otherwise spelled "The Civil War"), was finally published in full for the first time in 1973.

In 1647 a collection of his love verses, entitled The Mistress, was published, and in the next year a volume of wretched satires, The Four Ages of England, was brought out under his name, with the composition of which he had nothing to do[clarification needed]. In spite of the troubled times, usually so fatal to poetic fame, his reputation steadily increased, and when, on his return to England in 1656, he published a volume of his collected poetical works, he found himself without a rival in public esteem. This volume included the Pindarique Odes, the Davideis, the Mistress and some Miscellanies. Among the latter are to be found Cowley's most vital pieces. This section of his works opens with the famous aspiration:

"What shall I do to be for ever known,

And make the coming age my own?"

It contains elegies on Wotton, Vandyck, Falkland, William Hervey and Crashaw, the last two being among Cowley's finest poems, brilliant, sonorous and original; the amusing ballad of The Chronicle, giving a fictitious catalogue of his supposed amours; various gnomic pieces; and some charming paraphrases from Anacreon. The Pindarique Odes contain weighty lines and passages, buried in irregular and inharmonious masses of moral verbiage. Not more than one or two are good throughout, but a full posy of beauties may easily be culled from them. The long cadences of the Alexandrines with which most of the strophes close, continued to echo in English poetry from Dryden down to Gray, but the Odes themselves, which were found to be obscure by the poet's contemporaries, immediately fell into disesteem.

The 1656 edition includes the notorious passage in which Cowley abjures his loyalty to the crown: "yet when the event of battle, and the unaccountable will of God has determined the controversie, and that we have submitted to the conditions of the Conqueror, we must lay down our Pens as well as Arms, we must march out of our Cause itself, and dismantle that, as well as our own Towns and Castles, of all the Works and Fortifications as Wit and Reason by which we defended it."

'The Mistress' was the most popular poetic reading of the age, and is now the least read of all Cowley's works. It was the last and most violent expression of the amatory affectation of the 17th century, an affectation which had been endurable in Donne and other early writers because it had been the vehicle of sincere emotion, but was unendurable in Cowley because in him it represented nothing but a perfunctory exercise, a mere exhibition of literary calisthenics. He appears to have been of a cold, or at least of a timid, disposition; in the face of these elaborately erotic volumes, we are told that to the end of his days he never summoned up courage to speak of love to a single woman in real life. The "Leonora" of The Chronicle is said to have been the only woman he ever loved, and she married the brother of his biographer, Sprat.

Return to England

Soon after his return to England he was seized in mistake for another person, and only obtained his liberty on a bail of £1000. In 1658 he revised and altered his play of The Guardian, and prepared it for the press under the title of The Cutter of Coleman Street, but it was not staged until 1661. Late in 1658 Oliver Cromwell died, and Cowley took advantage of the resulting confusion to escape to Paris, where he remained until the Restoration brought him back in Charles's train. In 1662, he published the first two books of Plantarum (Plantarum libri duo). He published in 1663 Verses upon several occasions, in which The Complaint is included.

Cowley obtained permission to retire into the country; and through his friend, Lord St Albans, he obtained a property near Chertsey, where, devoting himself to botany and books, he lived in comparative solitude until his death. He took a practical interest in experimental science, and he was one of those advocating the foundation of an academy for the protection of scientific enterprise. Cowley's pamphlet on The Advancement of Experimental Philosophy, 1661, immediately preceded the foundation of the Royal Society, to which Cowley, in March 1667, at the suggestion of John Evelyn, addressed an ode. He is also known for having provided the earliest reference to coca in English literature, in "Pomona", the fifth book of his posthumously published Latin work Plantarum libri sex (included in Works, 1668; translated as Six Books of Plants in 1689).

He died in the Porch House in Chertsey, in consequence of having caught a cold while superintending his farm-labourers in the meadows late on a summer evening. On 3 August, Cowley was buried in Westminster Abbey beside the ashes of Chaucer and Spenser, where in 1675 the Duke of Buckingham erected a monument to his memory. The poetry of Cowley rapidly fell into neglect.

The first volume of Cowley's collected works was published in 1668, when Thomas Sprat brought out an edition in folio, to which he prefixed a life of the poet. This included Poemata Latina, including the Plantarum libri sex (Six Books of Plants). Additional volumes were added in 1681 and 1689. There were many reprints of this collection, which formed the standard edition till 1881, when it was superseded by Alexander Balloch Grosart's privately printed edition in two volumes, for the Chertsey Worthies library. The Essays have frequently been revived.

Bibliography

Poeticall Blossomes (1633; revised 1636) , Loves Riddle (1638), a play , Naufragium Joculare (1638), a play , The Guardian (1641), a play, later revised as The Cutter of Coleman Street (performed 1661; published 1663)

A Satyre Against Separatists (1642), also known as The Puritans Lecture

A Satire: The Puritan and the Papist (1643) , The Mistress; or, Several Copies of Love-Verses (1647) , Poems (1656), includes Miscellanies, Anacreontiques, Davideis and Pindarique Odes , A Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy (1661) , Plantarum libri duo (1662) , Verses Lately Written Upon Several Occasions (1663) , Ode to the Royal Society (1667)

Works (1668), "Consisting of Those which were formerly Printed: and, Those which he Design'd for the Press", includes Essays and Plantarum libri sex

Works (1681), with a second part, "Being what was Written and Published by himself in his Younger Years" , Works (1689), with a third part, "Being His Six Books of Plants, Never before Printed in English"

Abraham Cowley Poems

A Supplication , Against Fruition ,Against Hope , An Answer To A Copy Of Verses Sent Me To Jersey , Anacreontics, Drinking , Anacreontics, The Epicure , Anacreontics, The Swallow , Bathing In The River , Beauty, Concealment , Constantia's Song , Cousel , Davideis: A Sacred Poem Of The Troubles Of David (excerpt) , Epitaph , Hymn. To Light , Inconstancy , Life , Not Fair , Of Wit , On the Death of Mr. Crashaw , On the Death of Mr. William Hervey , On The Death Of Sir Henry Wootton , Platonick Love , Reason, The Use Of It In Divine Matters , Resolved To Be Loved , Sleep , Sport , The Change , The Chronicle , The Despair , The Epicure , The Given Heart , The Given Love , The Grasshopper , The Heart Breaking , The Innocent Ill , The Motto , The Parting , The Praise of Pindar in Imitation of Horace His Second Ode, Book 4 , The Request , The Spring , The Thief , The Thraldom , The Tree Of Knowledge , The Usurpation , The Vote (excerpt) , The Welcome , The Wish , Thisbe's Song , To Sir William Davenant , To The Lord Falkland , To The Royal Society , Written In Juice Of Lemon