Swift after Cowley

Abstract

Swift after Cowley Daniel Cook Abraham Cowley advocated an exhilarating combination of boldness and originality that resounded throughout Restoration poetry: “We break up Tombs with Sacrilegious Hands, / Old Rubbish we remove,” he writes, “Whilst still the Liberal Earth does hold / So many Virgin Mines of undiscover’d Gold” (“To Mr Hobs”).1 In fact, Howard D. Weinbrot has singled out the appearance of Cowley’s Pindarics in 1656 as the instigator of “perhaps the most important revolution in British poetic form.”2 Peter J. Schakel surmises that Cowley’s high seriousness in particular appealed to many fledgling writers in the mid-seventeenth century.3 Venturing into verse sometime later, in the early 1690s, the young satirist Jonathan Swift might seem to be an unlikely student of Cowley, though. (The latter had died in the summer of 1667, almost three months before Swift was even born; that said, Cowley’s collected works continued to be reissued well into the next century.) After all, as Noelle Dückmann Gallagher recently observed, panegyrics “are not simply embarrassing to us now; they have been embarrassing readers for more than three centuries.”4 But two of Swift’s earliest poems, “Ode to the King” and “Ode to the Athenian Society,” were explicitly modeled on “Ode. Upon His Majesty’s Restoration and Return” and “To the Royal Society,” respectively, as well as a handful of other works.5 As Swift himself recognized at the time, “I find when I writt what pleases me I am Cowley to my self and can read it a hundred times over.”6 And two other early odes, “Ode to Sancroft” and “Ode to the Honourable Sir William Temple,” are broadly Cowleyan; he switched to heroic couplets in “To Mr Congreve” and “Occasioned by Sir William Temple’s Late Illness and Recovery.” Soon after, he found the conversational mode that became his vehicle of choice for occasional and personal verse alike. David Sheehan has compellingly argued that, in spite of outward appearances, Swift’s early odes reveal an early satiric impulse much more readily than a panegyric one, in an influential reading that [End Page 37] preempts Gallagher’s more recent account of the panegyric at large insofar as it attempts to salvage Swift from what the latter calls the “unfashionable genre.”7 The satiric impulse is undeniable: it is hardwired into Swift’s substantial body of verse and prose. But such a generalization takes us only so far toward understanding what he was doing with the Cowleyan ode at the outset of his career as a poet. If we read Swift’s early odes as ironic we might be inclined to view his long-term poetics as remarkably consistent in scope if not in kind. That is, his turn to the conversational mode would mark a change in format rather than impulse—an impulse that remains satiric, sardonic, and perhaps derisory. If we read the early poems as sincere, however, it stands to reason that Swift should be judged as a failed odist writing at the end of an extravagant panegyrical tradition that would soon be emphatically demolished by Matthew Prior and other political poets.8 I want to suggest a third way: Swift was not mocking the Restoration ode so much as he was exposing its inappropriateness for modern poetry through a staged crisis of the fictive poet figure. After all, a poet can be simultaneously satirical and sincere; poetry can be taken ironically or earnestly. An attentive reader of Cowley and other Restoration odists, Swift does not uniformly parody their works, though he does travesty specific phrases and motifs. Invading their materials, he returns with self-reflexive commentaries on his own suitableness for post-Restoration panegyrics. Notionally tracing over the Cowleyan ode in “Ode to the King” and “Ode to the Athenian Society,” Swift provides paper-thin palimpsests of shifting trends in seventeenth-century poetry and his own position within them. How useful a model was Cowley by this stage? What is an odist to do without an obvious hero or villain as their subject? Who appoints an odist, anyway? What sort of poet did Swift want to be in his early twenties? The fledgling poet’s earliest...