Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)

Featuring nine chapters by a group of internationally renowned scholars, this book recovers Cowley's 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's famous definition of metaphysical poetry in the first place. What circumstances led to Cowley's sudden, precipitous fall? This book argues that Cowley's initial popularity and later fall in reputation have a similar origin: the experimental qualities, and the range, of his poetry. Cowley's 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's 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.