Cowley, Abraham

(1618-1667)

   The son of a London stationer, he was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he and Richard Crashaw became friends. After Crashaw's death Cowley wrote an elegy addressing him as "poet and saint." A supporter of the Royalists in the English Civil War, he moved to Oxford, where he wrote the satire The Puritan and the Papist (1643). In 1644 he went into exile in Paris as secretary to Lord Jermyn, Queen Henrietta Maria's chamberlain. When he returned to England, he was imprisoned briefly as a Royalist spy. His greatest contribution to posterity was adapting the difficult style of the Greek lyric poet Pindar to the English ode. He is buried near Chaucer and Spenser in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. Charles II declared that he had not left a better man behind him in England. His main publications: Pyramus and Thisbe, 1628. Constantius and Philetus, 1630. Poetical Blossoms, 1633. The Mistress, 1647. Ode Upon the Blessed Restoration, 1660. Verses upon several occasions, 1663. Some of his poems: "Beauty," "David and Jonathan," "Music and Poetry," "The Country-Mouse," "The Duel," "The Grasshopper."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition, 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). Jacobean and Caroline Poetry: An Anthology. T.G.S. Cain, ed. Methuen, 1981. Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets, 1779-1781 (http://www2.hn.psu.edu/Faculty/ KKemmerer/poets/preface.htm). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Westminster Abbey Official Guide (no date).