Ease, Confidence, Difficulty, and Grasshoppers

Abstract

One of the most popular, visible, and diverse authors of his time, Abraham Cowley has all but disappeared from the classroom, the literary canon, and research. Weaned on baroque, Metaphysical Verse, but ambitious to explore the ascendant neoclassical idiom, Cowley unnerves both researchers and publishers by combining what we today like to separate, especially by merging rather than contrasting the baroque and the neoclassical. Cowley’s easy, “pop” but also devilishly difficult verse reconciles the complex, harsh, and paradoxical utterances of the English baroque poets with neoclassical demands for clarity and lucidity. Through a process of continuous segmentation and modification, Cowley presents a conceit, image, idea, or metaphor, breaks it into components, and, as his poems progress, casually but instructively transforms these components into a veritable anthology of meanings and implications. Baroque oddity becomes neoclassical teaching as Cowley continuously supplies new information about verse peculiarities. Several case studies, including Cowley’s Pindaric ode to Thomas Hobbes, his well-known Royal Society ode, and his poem on the chair made of fragments from Sir Francis Drake’s ship, culminate with an analysis of Cowley’s whimsical “Anacreontic” on a grasshopper, a segmented creature that Cowley deploys as an epitome of culture and science.