Abraham Cowley Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Abraham Cowley was an English poet and man of letters, born in London in 1618 and dead in 1667. His father, a stationer, died when Cowley was young, and his mother ensured he received a solid schooling. At Westminster School he discovered Edmund Spenser, and the enchantments of The Faerie Queene turned a precocious reader into an early poet. Before he left school he published Poetical Blossoms (1633), a volume of youthful pieces that announced both ambition and facility. In 1637 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where classical study, rhetoric, and collegiate drama deepened his command of English and Latin verse and exposed him to a circle of writers that included, among others, Richard Crashaw, whose Catholic baroque manner he would later memorialize in a notable elegy.

Cambridge, Oxford, and First Literary Success
The turbulence of the 1640s, as civil war overtook England, scattered university communities. Cowley left Cambridge for Oxford, the Royalist capital, and there he continued writing while absorbing courtly and philosophical conversation. He drafted parts of a biblical epic, Davideis, on the life of King David, and polished love lyrics that would later be gathered as The Mistress. Even in this early period he was attracted to learned conceit and intricate stanzaic forms. His appetite for difficult structures would eventually find its boldest expression in English experiments with Pindaric odes.

Royalist Service and Exile
Cowley's most consequential apprenticeship came not only in libraries but also in the delicate labor of Royalist service. After the fortunes of King Charles I declined, Cowley crossed to the Continent and worked in Paris with the exiled household of Queen Henrietta Maria. Attached to the circle of Henry Jermyn (later Earl of St Albans), the Queen's chief adviser, Cowley served as a secretary and cipherer, managing correspondence and missions that took him across the Channel to the Spanish Netherlands and back to England under conditions of secrecy. The political disappointment and personal strain of exile left their mark, but the work kept him at the center of conversations about culture and policy and acquainted him with the cosmopolitan manners of the French court.

Publications of the Interregnum
Returning to England during the 1650s, Cowley consolidated his reputation with Poems (1656), a substantial volume that gathered his elegies, The Mistress, the unfinished Davideis, and the Pindarique Odes. These odes, modeled on Pindar yet boldly irregular in English, became both his signature and a later point of debate. They helped popularize a form that would be imitated for decades. In the same period he wrote The Guardian, a comedy first performed at Cambridge and later revised as The Cutter of Coleman Street, a Restoration stage success. His elegy for Richard Crashaw and the moving poem On the Death of Mr. William Hervey showed his range, balancing learned ingenuity with personal tenderness.

Restoration Hopes and Retreat from Court
With the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, many who had served the Royalist cause sought reward. Cowley, who had risked much in the Queen's service, hoped for a settled post. Instead, he received modest arrangements and leases that provided income but not office. Disenchanted with court life, he turned toward retirement, first at Barn Elms on the Thames and then at Chertsey in Surrey. There he pursued study, practical husbandry, and contemplation, shaping the prose reflections that would appear posthumously as Essays, in which pieces like Of Agriculture and Of Solitude articulate a humane ideal of rural retreat after the storms of faction.

Science, Society, and Intellectual Circles
If pastoral quiet attracted him, Cowley remained alert to the new science gathering institutional form in London. His ode To the Royal Society recognizes the experimental spirit championed in the circle that would include Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, and their colleagues. He hails Francis Bacon as a presiding genius of inquiry and endorses a program of disciplined observation over scholastic disputation. Diarists such as John Evelyn recorded their esteem for him, and he continued to be read and discussed by contemporaries like John Dryden, who admired aspects of his art while later questioning the irregularities of his Pindaric manner. The Restoration stage brought him audiences alongside writers such as Sir William Davenant, while courtiers who had known him in Paris, among them Henry Jermyn and the companions of Queen Henrietta Maria, remained part of his social horizon even as he withdrew to the countryside.

Style, Themes, and Major Works
Cowley's poetry straddles the line between the so-called metaphysical and the courtly classical. He is learned and agile in comparison and yet often lucid in statement, with a gift for turning argument into song. The Mistress collects love lyrics that dramatize desire, inconstancy, and wit; Davideis, though unfinished, displays epic ambition in English couplets applied to sacred history; the elegies show a grave charity. The Pindarique Odes, with their variable stanzas and leaps of thought, gave later poets a template for grandeur loosened from strict classical imitation. In comedy he moved from academic to commercial theater with The Cutter of Coleman Street, revealing a satiric edge sharpened by the politics of the age. His prose Essays, issued soon after his death under the guidance of friends, including Thomas Sprat, combine moral reflection with personal anecdote and affirmed a vision of measured, ethical retirement.

Last Years and Death
Chertsey afforded Cowley a measure of the tranquillity he desired, though his health was fragile. He died there in 1667 after a short illness. His friends and admirers saw to a burial befitting his rank among English poets: he was interred in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, where memorials of Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser had already symbolized a national canon. Thomas Sprat, later Bishop of Rochester and a historian of the Royal Society, provided an early biographical account that helped fix Cowley's image for posterity as a writer of great promise and varied achievement who sought peace after service.

Reception and Legacy
In his own century Cowley enjoyed a fame few could rival. For many readers of the 1650s and 1660s he was the English poet, a model of ingenuity and polish. Dryden's generation, reacting to the liberties of the Pindaric, gradually preferred more regular forms, but Dryden and others acknowledged Cowley's learning and fire. In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson's Life of Cowley, while written long after the poet's death, powerfully shaped critical memory, finding faults in excessive wit yet saluting the strength of his invention and the sincerity of his retreating wisdom. Modern readers, returning to the metaphysical tradition, have found in Cowley a writer who mediates between the baroque density of John Donne and the neoclassical clarity that would follow, and who bears witness to a moment when politics, science, and poetry shared a common language of experiment. His bonds with figures such as Queen Henrietta Maria and Henry Jermyn during exile, his presence on a Restoration stage that also hosted John Dryden, and his salute to the scientific enterprise that engaged Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren place him in the traffic of the age's central institutions. Above all, his poems and essays record a mind that sought proportion amid upheaval, and a craft that made intellectual energy sing.

Our collection contains 11 quotes who is written by Abraham, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Love - Live in the Moment - Hope.

• Abraham Cowley The Wish: “The Wish” is a poem where Cowley imagines a modest, retired country life, expressing his desire for quiet, independence, and freedom from courtly ambitions.
• Abraham Cowley teach me to Love: “Teach Me to Love” is a love poem by Cowley in which the speaker asks to be taught how to love wisely and virtuously rather than with merely passionate desire.
• Abraham Cowley essays: Cowley’s prose work “Several Discourses by Way of Essays” includes essays such as “Of Solitude,” “Of Liberty,” and “Of Agriculture,” reflecting his views on retirement and rural life.
• Abraham Cowley Davideis: “Davideis” is Cowley’s unfinished religious epic poem about the life of King David, written in heroic couplets and aiming to be a Christian epic in the classical style.
• Abraham Cowley dead poets society: Abraham Cowley is not featured in the film “Dead Poets Society,” but he is a 17th‑century English metaphysical poet sometimes studied alongside that era’s writers.
• Abraham Cowley pronunciation: Abraham Cowley is pronounced AY-bruh-ham KOH-lee.
• Abraham Cowley poems: Abraham Cowley is known for poems such as “The Mistress,” “Davideis,” “The Wish,” “Of Solitude,” and “Hymn to Light,” blending metaphysical wit with classical elegance.

• Wikipedia: Abraham Cowley