Miscellanies by Abraham Cowley

First published: 1656; also published as Poems

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

The reputation of Abraham Cowley has been affected more than that of many other English poets by the vicissitudes of literary taste. His contemporaries considered him one of their most distinguished poets. John Milton ranked him with William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. John Dryden considered him a model, following Cowley’s example in writing Pindaric odes. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, Cowley had fallen from favor, largely through the influential judgments rendered against him by Samuel Johnson in The Lives of the Poets (1779-1781).

The first poet to be immortalized in Johnson’s collection, Cowley is considered too irregular and “specific” a poet to be ranked among the greatest practitioners of the genre. Johnson found Cowley’s penchant for irregular versification and his tendency to reach for extraordinary and unusual comparisons disturbing. Johnson described the approach taken by Cowley—and his contemporaries John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, and George Herbert—in the term that became a touchstone for classifying many poets of the early seventeenth century: metaphysical. To Johnson, and to many readers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Cowley’s verse displayed more virtuoso learning than it did deep appreciation for that which is important to all humankind.

The charges against Cowley may be accurate in fact, but perhaps erroneous in implication. The verse forms Cowley uses, modeled on Greek writers such as Anacreon and Pindar, are not those that readers in the eighteenth century valued; individual poems contain within them lines of various lengths, irregular rhyme schemes, and varied stanzaic patterns. In addition, Cowley was intensely interested in capturing some of the new learning—scientific discoveries—in his work, and many of his unorthodox comparisons are attempts to integrate scientific learning into his art.

Tastes change, however, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, poets were returning to the practice of irregular versification and stanza patterns; by the twentieth century, the introduction of free verse and other forms of poetry expanded the boundaries of the definition of the genre so that Cowley’s works no longer seem so unusual. Readers who take the time to peruse the Miscellanies may discover that Cowley displays in his poetry the qualities of seriousness, learning, and imagination that characterize the best of the metaphysical poets.

Miscellanies is representative of Cowley’s work. The volume was published shortly after the poet’s return to England from France. Cowley, dispossessed of his fellowship at Cambridge University, had joined friends among the followers of Charles I at Oxford during the early years of the civil war. When many of the Royalists fled to France, Cowley was among them. In exile, he assisted the English queen in her correspondence with the king in England.

Miscellanies, according to Cowley’s preface, represents his attempt to preserve in print all of his poetry that he considered worth keeping for posterity. His avowed motivation was that he intended to write no more verse, and he wished to publish his own edition, so that an edition containing spurious or inferior writings would not be published after his death, as had already happened in the cases of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.

The Miscellanies consists of four parts. The first is a collection of poems on a variety of themes, some written when Cowley was quite young. The second section includes the poems Cowley had published in 1647 as The Mistress: Or, Several Copies of Love Verses, a series dealing with love in various aspects. The third part, which he labeled “Pindarique Odes,” includes translations from Pindar and free imitations in English of that poet’s work. The final portion of the volume contains the four books of the Davideis (1656), an unfinished epic poem, which Cowley completed.

In the first section, there are odes on wit, on the king’s return from Scotland, on Prometheus, on the pleasures of wine over the pangs of love, and on friendship; there are also imitations, in English, of both Horace and Martial. A light but pleasant poem is “The Chronicle,” an example of vers de société dealing with the experiences of a young man in love with a long series of young women. Of note also is a poem celebrating the publication of the first two books of Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert (1651, unfinished). The best, certainly the sincerest, poems of the Miscellanies are those written on the deaths of persons the poet had known and respected in life. The most outstanding of these is “On the Death of Mr. William Hervey.” Although the poem may seem to the twenty-first century reader extravagant in its tone, diction, and imagery, it compares favorably with the best elegiac poetry of the time. Other elegiac poems in the collection are those on Sir Henry Wotton; Mr. Jordan, a master at Westminster School; Sir Anthony Van Dyck, the painter; and Crashaw, the poet. Of little interest, other than for historical purposes, are some English paraphrases of the Greek lyric poet Anacreon.

Most critics have been less inclined to favor The Mistress. Like much of the love poetry of the earlier part of the seventeenth century, The Mistress is bound too closely by conventions in many respects. It supposedly deals with a courtship and the lady’s reception of the suit over a period of three years. That Cowley actually loved a woman of higher social rank and courted her with this poetry is doubtful, for the suffering lover, the standoffish lady of higher degree, and extravagant protestations of love are typical of the love poetry of the time—usually mere convention. Cowley’s unusual figures of speech, apparently influenced by Donne, were the target of critics through the late twentieth century. With the revived interest and renewed sympathy for the metaphysical poets and their techniques, however, Cowley’s exercise of his exceptionally learned and fertile fancy was viewed less stringently. In this section, the poem “The Spring” represents Cowley at his best, while “Written in Juice of Lemmon” shows him at a poorer level of performance.

For approximately one century, the ode—particularly the Pindaric ode as it was established by Cowley—was a favorite verse form among English poets and their imitators. In the eighteenth century, however, Johnson, literary arbiter of the era, pronounced against it. Undoubtedly the freedom of meter introduced by Cowley and exercised in his “Pindarique Odes” was a decisive factor in the popularity of the form, for, as they were written by Cowley, the odes appear deceptively easy. Modern literary opinion has been negative toward Cowley’s odes, declaring them too flat and imitative.

The last portion of the Miscellanies is taken up with the unfinished Davideis, four of the twelve books originally planned on the model of Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553). Cowley’s strong religious convictions led him to choose the figure of David, traditional ancestor of Jesus, as the hero for an epic poem. In these four books, he incorporated much of his learning, often in wide and only loosely connected digressions. Critics have argued the fitness of the subject; Cowley himself seems to have changed his mind about its suitability, since he left the work unfinished. What is more, as announced in the preface to the Miscellanies, Cowley wrote almost no poetry after publication of this volume.

Bibliography

Burrow, Colin, ed. Metaphysical Poetry. New York: Penguin, 2006. This anthology of metaphysical poetry, including selections from Cowley, features a brief but informative introduction that examines and defines “metaphysical poetry” for readers new to the style.

Cowley, Abraham. Selected Poems. Edited with an introduction and notes by David Hopkins and Tom Mason. Manchester, England: Carcanet Press, 1994. The critical introduction and annotations in this edition of Cowley’s poems enhances the understanding of the poet’s work.

Taaffe, James G. Abraham Cowley. New York: Twayne, 1972. A useful survey of Cowley’s poetic career. Analyzes and evaluates his major works, including the Miscellanies. Includes helpful notes and an annotated bibliography.

Williamson, George. Six Metaphysical Poets: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967. Reprint. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Offers a detailed examination of a number of Cowley’s poems from the 1656 collection as expressions of Metaphysical wit, a concept that Williamson uses to connect Cowley’s poetry to that of John Donne and other major poets active between the Renaissance and the neoclassical period.

Zwicker, Steven N., ed. The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650-1740. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Cowley’s work is discussed in two of this book’s essays: “Lyric Forms” by Joshua Scodel and “Classical Texts: Translations and Transformations” by Paul Hammond.