“Who Now Reads Cowley?”

Abstract

This essay sets up the volume, by demonstrating how popular Abraham Cowley was, right up until the end of the eighteenth century—Milton declared that the greatest English poets were Spenser, Shakespeare, and Cowley—and then explaining how he disappeared from the canon. Basically, all the seventeenth-century poets fell out of favor when tastes changed, but in the 20th century, critics, led by T.S. Eliot, began to recover Metaphysical Poetry, because it seemed similar to modern poetry; in so doing, they elevated Donne, Herbert, and Marvell (all of whom, compared to Cowley, were once minor poets), but they couldn’t fit Cowley into the Metaphysical genre, even though it was Cowley who occasioned the definition of Metaphysical Poetry (by Samuel Johnson) in the first place. The problem wasn’t with Cowley, but rather with modern notions of literary categories and assumptions that literary history proceeded sequentially. This essay will then argue that Cowley created problems for critics because he straddled literary categories, which will be demonstrated by analyzing a typical Cowley poem, his “Ode: Sitting and Drinking in the Chair, made of the Reliques of Sir Francis Drakes Ship,” showing how it could be baroque, or Metaphysical