Abraham Cowley - Wikipedia Abraham Cowley From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigation Jump to search 17th-century English writer Abraham Cowley, portrait by Peter Lely Abraham Cowley (/ˈkuːli/;[1] 1618 – 28 July 1667) was an English poet born in the City of London late in 1618. He was one of the leading English poets of the 17th century, with 14 printings of his Works published between 1668 and 1721.[2] Contents 1 Early life and career 2 Royalist in exile 3 Return to England 4 References 5 Sources 6 External links Early life and career[edit] Cowley's father, a wealthy citizen, 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.[3] As early as 1628, that is, in his tenth year, he composed his Tragicall History of Piramus and Thisbe, an epic romance written in a six-line stanza, a style of his own invention. It is not too much to say that this work is the most astonishing feat of imaginative precocity on record; it is marked by no great faults of immaturity, and possesses constructive merits of a very high order. Two years later the child wrote another and still more ambitious poem, Constantia and Philetus, being sent about the same time to Westminster School. Here he displayed extraordinary mental precocity and versatility, and wrote in his thirteenth year the Elegy on the Death of Dudley, Lord Carlton. These three poems of considerable size, and some smaller ones, were collected in 1633, and published in a volume entitled Poetical Blossoms, dedicated to Lambert Osbaldeston, the head master of the school, and prefaced by many laudatory verses by schoolfellows.[3] The author at once became famous, although he had not, even yet, completed his fifteenth year. His next composition was a pastoral comedy, entitled Love's 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 Randolph, whose earliest works, however, were at that time only just printed.[3] 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".[3] Portraits of Cowley, attributed to William Faithorne and Stephen Slaughter, are in Trinity College's collection.[5] 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, the rest being superseded in favour of an English version in four books, called the Davideis, which were 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.[3] Abraham Cowley In 1638 Love's Riddle and a Latin comedy, the Naufragium Joculare, were printed, and in 1641 the passage of Prince Charles through Cambridge gave occasion to the production of another dramatic work, The Guardian, which was acted 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.[3] Royalist in exile[edit] The learned quiet of the young poet's life was broken up by the Civil War; 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 was tossed, in the tumult of affairs, into the personal confidence of the royal family itself.[3] After the battle of Marston Moor he followed the queen to Paris, and the exile so commenced 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."[3] In spite of these labours he did not refrain from literary industry. During his exile he met with the works of Pindar, and determined to reproduce their lofty lyric passion in English.[3] However, Cowley misunderstood Pindar's metrical practice and therefore his reproduction of the Pindaric Ode form in English does 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 is still known as English "Pindarick" Ode, or Irregular Ode. One of the most famous odes written after Cowley in the Pindaric tradition is Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality".[citation needed] During this same time, Cowley occupied himself in writing 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 1697, 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.[6] 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. In spite of the troubles of the times, 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 later works already mentioned, 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.[3] 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.[3] Return to England[edit] 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 did not appear until 1661. Late in 1658 Oliver Cromwell died, and Cowley took advantage of the confusion of affairs to escape to Paris, where he remained until the Restoration brought him back in Charles's train. He published in 1663 Verses upon several occasions, in which The Complaint is included.[3] He is also known for having provided the earliest reference to coca in English literature, in a poem called "A legend of coca" in his 1662 collection of poems Six Books of Plants.[7] Abraham Cowley's Chertsey house 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 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. His Poemata Latina, including six books "Plantarum", were printed in 1668. The poetry of Cowley rapidly fell into neglect.[3] Frontispice and titlepage to a 1678 edition of the collected works of Abraham Cowley The works of Cowley were collected in 1668, when Thomas Sprat brought out an edition in folio, to which he prefixed a life of the poet. 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.[3] A Satire Against Separatists, printed in 1675, has been variously attributed to Cowley and to Peter Hausted.[citation needed] References[edit] ^ Alan Hager (ed.), The Age of Milton: An Encyclopedia of Major 17th-Century British and American Authors, ABC-CLIO, 2004, p. 89. ^ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography "Abraham Cowley" ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gosse, Edmund (1911). "Cowley, Abraham". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. 7 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 347–348. ^ "Cowley, Abraham (CWLY636A)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge. ^ "Trinity College, University of Cambridge". BBC Your Paintings. Archived from the original on 11 May 2014. Retrieved 12 February 2018. ^ Ed. Allan Pritchard. Abraham Cowley, The Civil War, Toronto,(UTPress: 1973) p.3 ^ Peru. History of coca, "the divine plant" of the Incas; with an introductory account of the Incas, and of the Andean Indians of to-day. W. Golden Mortimer, M.D. Ed. J. H. Vail & Co, 1901. Abraham Cowley's poem "A Legend of Coca" : in chapter I An introduction to the history of coca, pp. 25–27. Sources[edit]  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent & Sons – via Wikisource. External links[edit] Wikimedia Commons has media related to Abraham Cowley. Wikisource has original works written by or about: Abraham Cowley Wikisource has the text of the 1885–1900 Dictionary of National Biography's article about Abraham Cowley. Wikiquote has quotations related to: Abraham Cowley Works by Abraham Cowley at Project Gutenberg Works by or about Abraham Cowley at Internet Archive Works by Abraham Cowley at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) Essays by Abraham Cowley at Quotidiana.org Works of Abraham Cowley at Archive.org (pdf download) Samuel Johnson elevates Cowley for "easy poetry" v t e Metaphysical poetry Major poets John Donne (1572–1631) George Herbert (1593–1633) Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) Robert Southwell (c. 1561–1595) Richard Crashaw (c. 1613–1649) Thomas Traherne (1636/1637–1674) Henry Vaughan (1622–1695) Minor poets Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612–1672) Thomas Carew (1595–1640) George Chapman (c. 1559–1634) John Hall (c. 1627–1656) Edward Herbert (1583–1648) Richard Leigh (1649-1728) Katherine Philips (1632–1664) Sir John Suckling (1609–1642) Edward Taylor (c. 1642–1729) Critics Samuel Johnson T. S. Eliot Authority control BNF: cb121973647 (data) CANTIC: a11565780 GND: 118677187 ISNI: 0000 0001 0927 3222 LCCN: n50018768 MBA: 280b42e9-a4ff-4b6f-8786-1834a18018ce NDL: 00620534 NKC: jn20000700334 NLA: 35031753 NLG: 120604 NLI: 000035442 NTA: 070405956 SELIBR: 182914 SNAC: w6ht37fm SUDOC: 030588413 Trove: 804491 VcBA: 495/5884 VIAF: 95254963 WorldCat Identities: lccn-n50018768 Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Abraham_Cowley&oldid=990044084" Categories: 1618 births 1667 deaths English essayists Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge People from the City of London People educated at Westminster School, London Burials at Westminster Abbey 17th-century English poets 17th-century male writers Male essayists English male poets Hidden categories: Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica with Wikisource reference Wikipedia articles incorporating text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica Articles with short description Short description is different from Wikidata Use dmy dates from January 2020 EngvarB from January 2020 All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from May 2016 Wikipedia articles incorporating text from A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature Commons category link is on Wikidata Articles with Project Gutenberg links Articles with Internet Archive links Articles with LibriVox links Wikipedia articles with BNF identifiers Wikipedia articles with CANTIC identifiers Wikipedia articles with GND identifiers Wikipedia articles with ISNI identifiers Wikipedia articles with LCCN identifiers Wikipedia articles with MusicBrainz identifiers Wikipedia articles with NDL identifiers Wikipedia articles with NKC identifiers Wikipedia articles with NLA identifiers Wikipedia articles with NLG identifiers Wikipedia articles with NLI identifiers Wikipedia articles with NTA identifiers Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers Wikipedia articles with Trove identifiers Wikipedia articles with VcBA identifiers Wikipedia articles with VIAF identifiers Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers Navigation menu Personal tools Not logged in Talk Contributions Create account Log in Namespaces Article Talk Variants Views Read Edit View history More Search Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Donate Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Tools What links here Related changes Upload file Special pages Permanent link Page information Cite this page Wikidata item Print/export Download as PDF Printable version In other projects Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Languages العربية Cymraeg Deutsch Español Euskara فارسی Français Հայերեն Italiano עברית മലയാളം Nederlands 日本語 Norsk bokmål Norsk nynorsk Polski Português Română Русский Simple English Svenska Edit links This page was last edited on 22 November 2020, at 13:42 (UTC). 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