Abraham Cowley

[3] As early as 1628, when he was only ten years old, he composed his Tragicall Historie of Piramus and Thisbe, an epic romance written in a six-line stanza, a style of his own invention.

It has been considered to be a most astonishing feat of imaginative precocity; it is marked by no great faults of immaturity, and possesses constructive merits of a very high order.

These three lengthy poems, and some smaller ones, were collected in 1633, and published in a volume entitled Poeticall Blossomes, dedicated to Lambert Osbaldeston, the headmaster of the school, and prefaced by many laudatory verses by schoolfellows.

His next composition was a pastoral comedy, entitled Loves Riddle, a marvellous production for a boy of sixteen, airy, correct and harmonious in language, and rapid in movement.

[3] In 1637 Cowley went up to Trinity College, Cambridge,[4] where he "betook himself with enthusiasm to the study of all kinds of learning, and early distinguished himself as a ripe scholar".

[9] In 1647 a collection of his love verses, entitled The Mistress, was published, and in the next year a volume of wretched satires, The Four Ages of England, was brought out under his name, with the composition of which he had nothing to do[clarification needed].

This section of his works opens with the famous aspiration: It contains elegies on Wotton, Vandyck, Falkland, William Hervey and Crashaw, the last two being among Cowley's finest poems, brilliant, sonorous and original; the amusing ballad of The Chronicle, giving a fictitious catalogue of his supposed amours; various gnomic pieces; and some charming paraphrases from Anacreon.

The long cadences of the Alexandrines with which most of the strophes close, continued to echo in English poetry from Dryden down to Gray, but the Odes themselves, which were found to be obscure by the poet's contemporaries, immediately fell into disesteem.

[3] The 1656 edition includes the notorious passage in which Cowley abjures his loyalty to the crown: "yet when the event of battle, and the unaccountable will of God has determined the controversie, and that we have submitted to the conditions of the Conqueror, we must lay down our Pens as well as Arms, we must march out of our Cause itself, and dismantle that, as well as our own Towns and Castles, of all the Works and Fortifications as Wit and Reason by which we defended it."

He appears to have been of a reserved disposition; in the face of these elaborately erotic volumes, we are told that to the end of his days he never spoke of love to a single woman in real life.

Late in 1658 Oliver Cromwell died, and Cowley took advantage of the resulting confusion to escape to Paris, where he remained until the Restoration brought him back in Charles's train.

[10][11] He died in the Porch House in Chertsey, in consequence of having caught a cold while superintending his farm-labourers in the meadows late on a summer evening.

On 3 August, Cowley was buried in Westminster Abbey beside the ashes of Chaucer and Spenser, where in 1675 the Duke of Buckingham erected a monument to his memory.

[3] The first volume of Cowley's collected works was published in 1668, when Thomas Sprat brought out an edition in folio, to which he prefixed a life of the poet.