Abraham Cowley
(1618–1667)
Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900)
COWLEY, ABRAHAM (1618–1667), poet, was born in London in 1618. He was the seventh and posthumous child of his father, Thomas Cowley, a stationer (see Notes and Queries, 4th ser. xi. 340, 371, 389, 429, 450, 530), who left 1,000l. to be divided among his children. His mother obtained his admission as a king's scholar at Westminster. He had already been drawn to poetry by reading a copy of the ‘Faërie Queen,’ which lay in his mother's parlour (Essay XI., ‘On Myself’). A collection of five poems called ‘Poetical Blossoms’ was published in 1633. A second edition, with the addition of ‘Sylva, or dyvers copies of verses,’ appeared in 1636, and a third in 1637. It is probable that no poet has given more remarkable proofs of precocity. He says in his preface that he wrote one of the pieces, the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe,’ at the age of ten, and the ‘Constantius and Philetus’ two years later. Cowley's masters could never force him to undertake the drudgery of learning his grammar, and excused him on the ground that his natural quickness made it needless. Perhaps his scholarship suffered, for he is said to have been an unsuccessful candidate for election to Cambridge in 1636. On 14 June 1637, however, he became a scholar of Trinity College (see extracts from College Register in J. R. Lumby's preface to Cowley's Prose Works, 1887). At the university he continued his poetical activity. In 1638 he published a pastoral drama called ‘Love's Riddle,’ written about the age of sixteen. On 2 Feb. 1638 his Latin comedy called ‘Naufragium Joculare’ was played before the university by members of Trinity College, and was published soon afterwards. An elegy on the death of an intimate friend, William Harvey, introduced him to Harvey's brother John, who rendered him many services, and through whom, or through Stephen Goffe (Wood), he became known to Lord St. Albans. He was B.A., 1639; ‘minor fellow,’ 30 Oct. 1640; and M.A., 1642. He appears never to have become a ‘major fellow’ (Lumby). When Prince Charles was passing through Cambridge in 1641, he was entertained (12 March) by a comedy, ‘The Guardian,’ hastily put together for the purpose by Cowley. It was not printed till 1650, when Cowley was out of England. Cowley (preface to ‘Cutter of Coleman Street’) says that it was several times acted privately during the suppression of the theatres. In 1658 he rewrote it, and it was performed as ‘The Cutter of Coleman Street’ on 16 Dec. 1661 at Lincoln's Inn Fields, when Pepys was present. Cowley published it in 1663. It was first taken (as he tells us) for an attack upon the ‘king's party,’ and, as Dryden told Dennis (dedication to ‘Comical Gallant’), was ‘barbarously treated,’ but afterwards succeeded tolerably. According to Downes it ran for ‘a whole week’ with a full house.
Cowley meanwhile continued to write poetry, composing many occasional pieces and great part of his ‘Davideis’ at the university. In 1643–4 he was ejected from Cambridge and retired to Oxford, whither his friend Crashaw had preceded him. A satire called ‘The Puritan and the Papist,’ published in the same year, and republished in a collection called ‘Wit and Loyalty revived’ (1682), is attributed to him by Wood, and was first added to his works by Johnson (it is also in ‘Somers Tracts,’ v. 480–7). At Oxford he settled in St. John's College, and here became intimate with Lord Falkland and other royalist leaders. He became a member of the family of Jermyn, afterwards earl of St. Albans, and in 1646 followed the queen to France. Here he found Crashaw in distress, and introduced him to the queen. Cowley was employed in various diplomatic services by the exiled court. He was sent on missions to Jersey, Holland, and elsewhere, and was afterwards employed in conducting a correspondence in cipher between Charles I and his wife. His work, we are told, occupied all his days and two or three nights a week. The collection of his poems called ‘The Mistress’ appeared in London in 1647. They became the favourite love poems of the age. Barnes (Anacreon, 1705, xxxii.) states that whatever Cowley may say in his poetry, he was never in love but once, and then had not the courage to avow his passion. Pope says that Cowley's only love was the Leonora of his ‘Chronicle’ who married Sprat's brother (Spence, p. 286). In 1648 two satires, ‘The Four Ages of England, or the Iron Age,’ and ‘A Satyre against Separatists,’ were published in one volume under his name, but were disavowed by him in the preface to his ‘Poems’ (1656). Though he only mentions the ‘Iron Age,’ he doubtless refers to the whole volume.
In 1656 Cowley was sent to England, in order (as Sprat says) that he might obtain information while affecting compliance and wish for retirement. He was arrested by mistake for another person, but was only released upon bail for 1,000l., for which Dr. (afterwards Sir) Charles Scarborough [q. v.], to whom one of his odes is addressed, became security. He remained under bail until the Restoration. In the preface to his next book (1656) he declares his intention of abandoning poetry and ‘burying himself in some obscure retreat in America.’ A passage in which he intimates a disposition to acquiesce in the new order was omitted by Sprat from the preface when republished, and provoked, as Sprat admits, some disapproval from his own party This book is his most important collection of poems. It consists of (1) ‘Miscellanies,’ including, with his juvenile pieces, many later poems, especially the spirited ‘Chronicle’ and the fine elegies on Harvey and Crashaw; (2) ‘The Mistress,’ reprinted from the edition of 1647. (3) ‘Pindarique Odes;’ (4) the ‘Davideis;’ four books out of twelve as originally designed. This ponderous epic was chiefly written at college, and Cowley says that he has now neither the leisure nor the appetite to finish it. There is quite enough as it is. The preface refers to an unfinished poem ‘On the Civil War.’ A poem professing to be the one mentioned was published in 1679, and is in later collections. He now took to medicine, as a blind, according to Sprat, for his real designs. He was created M.D. at Oxford on 2 Dec. 1657, by an order from the government, which, according to Wood, gave offence to his friends. He retired to ‘a fruitful part of Kent to pursue the study of simples,’ and wrote a Latin poem, ‘Plantarum Libri duo’ (1662); it was included in ‘Poemata Latina in quibus continentur sex Libri Plantarum et unus Miscellaniorum,’ 1668 (2nd ed. 1678).
Cowley again retired to France. He tried to put himself forward at the Restoration. In 1660 he published a heavy ‘Ode upon the Blessed Restoration …’ In 1661 appeared his fine ‘Vision, concerning his late pretended Highness, Cromwell the Wicked; containing a Discourse in Vindication of him by a pretended Angel and the confutation thereof by the author, Abraham Cowley.’ In 1661 appeared also ‘A Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy.’ He also wrote an ‘Ode to the Royal Society.’ ‘Dr. Cowley’ took an interest, like all the cultivated men of the time, in the foundation of this society, and was one of the first members incorporated (Birch, Royal Society, i. 4). He was associated with Evelyn and others in a project for the foundation of a philosophical college, for which he gives a plan in his ‘Essays.’ His ‘Ode to Hobbes’ gives further proof of his interest in new speculations. In 1663 appeared ‘Verses upon several occasions’ (after a piratical publication in Dublin). In one of these, called ‘The Complaint,’ he describes himself as ‘the melancholy Cowley,’ and bewails his neglect. He applied unsuccessfully for the mastership of the Savoy (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1661–2, p. 210). Some verses of the ‘Session of the Poets’ in ‘State Poems’ 1697 allude to this and the failure of his play:—
Savoy missing Cowley came into the court,
Making apologies for his bad play;
Every one gave him so good a report,
That Apollo gave heed to all he could say,
Nor would he have had, 'tis thought, a rebuke
Unless he had done some notable folly;
Writ verses unjustly in praise of Sam Tuke
Or printed his pitiful melancholy.
His claims were at last acknowledged by a favourable lease of the queen's lands obtained for him by the Earl of St. Albans and the Duke of Buckingham. He was now enabled to live at his ease in the retirement which he often professed to love. He settled at Barn Elms, and afterwards in the ‘Porch House’ at Chertsey. He removed thither in April 1665. His health declined, and from a letter to Sprat, 21 May 1665, preserved by Peck, we find that his tenants did not pay their rents, and that a fall had injured his ribs. He died on 28 July 1667; Sprat declares that his death was occasioned by his ‘very delight in the country and the fields.’ He caught cold, according to Sprat, after apparently recovering from his accident, by staying out too long ‘amongst his labourers in the meadows.’ A different tradition, preserved by Pope (Spence's Anecdotes, p. 13), states that Cowley and Sprat came home late from a too jovial dinner with a neighbour and had to pass the night under a hedge. Mr. Stebbing points out that there is probably some confusion with a ‘dean’ mentioned in a letter from Cowley to Sprat, probably the nickname of some convivial neighbour. Warton says that his income was about 300l. a year, and that in his last years he avoided female society. He was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey, near Chaucer and Spenser, and Charles II declared that he had not left a better man behind him in England. His will (dated 28 Sept. 1665) leaves the care of his works to Sprat. The property is left to his brother Thomas, with a good many small legacies. He gave some books to Trinity College. Cowley's house is now called by his name, and is on the west side of Guildford Street, near the railway station. The porch from which it was named was removed by Alderman Clarke, a later occupant of the house, in 1786 (Thorne, Environs of London').
Cowley's reputation was at its highest during his lifetime, when he was regarded as the model of cultivated poetry. Dryden's frequent references to Cowley show that his reputation was beginning to decline. Dryden says (Essay on Heroic Plays, 1672) that ‘his authority is almost sacred to me.’ He elsewhere calls Cowley the darling of his youth (Essay on Satire, 1693). He complains of the ‘Davideis’ as full of ‘points of wit and quirks of epigram’ (Essay on Satire). He greatly prefers the ‘Pindaric’ odes to the ‘Mistress,’ and thinks Cowley's latest compositions undoubtedly the best of his poems. From Dryden's preface to the ‘State of Innocence’ (1674) it seems that the odes were already condemned for their ‘fustian’ by some critics, and in the preface to his ‘Fables’ (1700) he remarks that Cowley is so sunk in reputation that now only a hundred copies are sold in a twelvemonth instead of ten editions in ten years. Addison, in his ‘Epistle to Sacheverell’ (1694), is enthusiastic over the odes, but hints that Cowley's ‘only fault is wit in its excess.’ Congreve, in the preface to his ‘Ode upon Blenheim,’ complains, while professing the highest admiration for Cowley, of the irregularity of his stanzas in the so-called ‘Pindaric Ode.’ The precedent set by Cowley of formless versification has found many imitations in spite of Congreve's protests and the later influence of Collins and Gray. Cowley's odes themselves have followed most of his poetry into oblivion. Pope's often-quoted phrase, epistle to Augustus (75–78), gives the opinion which was orthodox in 1737:—
Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit;
Forgot his epic, nay Pindaric art,
But still I love the language of his heart.
Cowley was still mentioned with high respect during the eighteenth century, and was the first poet in the collection to which Johnson contributed prefaces. Johnson's life in that collection was famous for its criticism of the ‘metaphysical’ poets, the hint of which is given in Dryden's ‘Essay on Satire.’ It assigns the obvious cause for the decline of Cowley's fame. The ‘metaphysical poets’ are courtier pedants. They represent the intrusion into poetry of the love of dialectical subtlety encouraged by the still prevalent system of scholastic disputation. In Cowley's poems, as in Donne's, there are many examples of the technical language of the schools, and the habit of thought is perceptible throughout. In the next generation the method became obsolete and then offensive. Cowley can only be said to survive in the few pieces where he condescends to be unaffected, and especially in the prose of his essays, which are among the earliest examples in the language of simple and graceful prose, with some charming poetry interspersed.
The first collection of his works, in one volume folio, appeared in 1668, and in this, for the first time, were included ‘Several Discourses by way of Essays in Prose and Verse.’ Eight editions appeared before 1700, a ninth in 1700, and many more later. Hurd's ‘Selections’ appeared in 1772, and ‘Works’ by Aikin, 3 vols., 1802.
Two portraits of Cowley are in the Bodleian. A portrait by Lely was bought by the nation in Peel's collection. In Trinity College there is a crayon drawing in the master's lodge, presented in 1824 by R. Clarke, chamberlain of the city of London, and a portrait in the hall, probably a copy from an earlier picture. Engravings by Faithorne are prefixed to his ‘Latin Poems’ (1668) and to his ‘Works’ (1668). An engraving of him at the age of thirteen is prefixed to the ‘Poetical Blossoms,’ but is missing in most copies.
Encyclopædia Britannica 11th edition (1911)
COWLEY, ABRAHAM (1618–1667), English poet, was born in the city of London late in 1618. His 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 Faery Queen. This became the favourite reading of her son, and he had twice devoured it all before he was sent to school. As early as 1628, that is, in his tenth year, he composed his Tragicall History of Piramus and Thisbe, an epical romance written in a six-line stanza, 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 the most extraordinary mental precocity and versatility, and wrote in his thirteenth year yet another poem, 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 the head master of the school, and prefaced by many laudatory verses by schoolfellows. 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. In 1637 Cowley was elected into Trinity College, Cambridge, where he betook himself with enthusiasm to the study of all kinds of learning, and early distinguished himself as a ripe scholar. 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 he published a long time after. This his most grave and important work is remarkable as having suggested to Milton several points which he afterwards made use of. The epic, written in a very dreary and turgid manner, but in good rhymed heroic verse, deals with the adventures of King David from his boyhood to the smiting of Amalek by Saul, where it abruptly closes. 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.
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. 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, Holland, 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 literary industry. During his exile he met with the works of Pindar, and determined to reproduce their lofty lyric passion in English. At the same time he occupied himself in writing a history of the Civil War, which he completed as far as the battle of Newbury, but unfortunately afterwards destroyed. 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. 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.
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 1663. 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.
Wearied with the broils and fatigues of a political life, Cowley obtained permission to retire into the country; through his friend, Lord St Albans, he obtained a property near Chertsey, and here, devoting himself to the study of botany, and buried in his books, he lived in comparative solitude until his death. He took a great and practical interest in experimental science, and he was one of those who were most prominent in advocating the foundation of an academy for the protection of scientific enterprise. Cowley’s pamphlet on The Advancement of Experimental Philosophy, 1661, led directly to the foundation of the Royal Society, to which body Cowley, in March 1667, at the suggestion of Evelyn, addressed an ode which is the latest and one of the strongest of his poems. He died in the Porch House, in Chertsey, on the 28th of July 1667, in consequence of having caught a cold while superintending his farm-labourers in the meadows late on a summer evening. On the 3rd of 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 Poëmata Latina, including six books “Plantarum,” were printed in 1668.
Throughout their parallel lives the fame of Cowley completely eclipsed that of Milton, but posterity instantly and finally reversed the judgment of their contemporaries. The poetry of Cowley rapidly fell into a neglect as unjust as the earlier popularity had been. As a prose writer, especially as an essayist, he holds, and will not lose, a high position in literature; as a poet it is hardly possible that he can enjoy more than a very partial revival. The want of nature, the obvious and awkward art, the defective melody of his poems, destroy the interest that their ingenuity and occasional majesty would otherwise excite. He had lofty views of the mission of a poet and an insatiable ambition, but his chief claim to poetic life is the dowry of sonorous lyric style which he passed down to Dryden and his successors of the 18th century.