Abraham Cowley

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Abraham Cowley, portrait by Peter Lely

Abraham Cowley (* 1618 in London , † July 28, 1667 in Chertsey ) was one of the most popular English poets of the 17th century.

Life

The most important sources for the life of Cowley are his autobiographical essay "On My Self" and a life report written by Thomas Sprat , which is included in the first complete edition published a year after Cowley's death. Sprat met Cowley in 1657.

Childhood and youth

Cowley was born between August and December 1618, the youngest of seven children of wealthy stationery dealer Thomas Cowley, who died a few months before Cowley was born. The exact date of birth is not known, as the corresponding church book was lost in the great fire of London in 1666. As a child he found Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene among his mother's books and was deeply impressed by it. Influenced by this, he wrote his first poem at the age of ten, "The Tragicall Historie of Pyramus and Thisbe". At twelve he went to school at St. Peter's College in Westminster . He wrote two other longer and some short poems, which were published together with his first in 1633 under the title Poetical Blossomes . He then wrote the pastoral comedy Loves Riddle , which was likely staged in Westminster before it was printed in 1638.

Education

In 1636, Cowley applied to Cambridge University , where he was initially rejected, but was accepted at Trinity College later that year . This is where the first drafts of Davideis , his epic verse about the Old Testament King David, are made . He also wrote a Latin comedy called Naufragium Joculare , which was performed at his college in 1638 and published that same year. In 1637, 1640 and 1641 he took part in poetry anthologies published by the university . When Prince Charles, who later became Charles II , visited Cambridge, Cowley had the honor of directing a play for the entertainment of the Prince. The comedy The Guardian premiered in his presence on March 12, 1642 . Cowley also wrote a political satire in verse while at Cambridge. It bears the title "The Puritans Lecture" in the manuscripts, but was published in 1642 under the title A Satire against Separatists and under the pseudonym AC Generous . The following year Cowley received his Masters degree and was then dismissed from the parliamentary university because of his royalist stance.

Civil War and Commonwealth

He then went to Oxford, where he wrote his second verse satire A Satire. The Puritan and the Papist finished and published anonymously. He began his war epic The Civil War in 1642 and was considered the most important poet on the king's side during the Civil War . He came into direct contact with the royal family and served King Charles I when he was residing in Oxford in 1644. When Queen Henrietta Maria went into exile in France, Cowley was a secretary among her entourage. From Paris he accompanied his direct superior Lord Jermyn, later the Earl of St. Albans, on several trips on behalf of the Queen.

However, he was also active in literature in exile: In 1647 a collection of love poems called The Mistress appeared , which later became one of his most widely read works. The poems in this collection, whose model can be found in the poetry of John Donne , revolve around the Petrarchist topoi of brittle lovers and unrequited love , but strike a different note. Here, in the style of metaphysical poetry, the speaker uses his love affliction primarily to prove his wit and sagacity through absurd exaggerations, startling comparisons and paradoxical conclusions.

In 1650 his play The Guardian , performed in honor of the prince in 1642 , was published. In 1654 he returned to England pretending to have resigned from service; in truth he was supposed to sound out the situation in England. Since he arranged a meeting between George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham , and an envoy from Oliver Cromwell , he fell into disrepute with the king. The rulers of the Commonwealth also became aware of him: he was arrested on April 12, 1655, interrogated and imprisoned in Whitehall the following day . Dr. Charles Scarborough , a student friend and later personal physician to Charles II, paid the £ 1,000 bail, which Cowley was released.

Before and during his imprisonment he prepared the volume of poems Poems , which appeared in 1656 and contained both published and new poems, including several elegies on deceased contemporaries, e. B. his fellow poet Richard Crashaw . In this volume he distanced himself from his earlier political poems and from The Guardian and spoke of an alleged desire to emigrate to America. He wanted to avoid further repression. In the same year, the epic Davideis, which had already begun in Cambridge, and Pindarique Odes , a volume with odes already written in France and influenced by Pindar , appeared in four volumes in four volumes , which in their irregular form sing with enthusiasm and emotion about outstanding individuals like Thomas Hobbes or abstract subjects like address fate or poetry. Thereby he made this form of poetry popular in England, which continued to have an effect until the early 19th century.

Cowley's epic Davideis is also one of his most ambitious works. Like John Milton in Paradise Lost (1667), he places the classic genre of the epic with an Old Testament theme in the tradition of Christianity. Of the planned twelve volumes, however, Cowley only completed four.

In 1656 and 1657, Cowley retired to Kent to work in medicine and botany. Sprat suspects, however, that he continued to work for the crown and that his scientific work was just a camouflage. However, he received a doctorate in medicine from the University of Oxford .

Then he was again active as a writer, so in 1661 the anti-Cromwellian satire The Visions and Prophecies Concerning England, Scotland and Ireland and in 1663 the comedy Cutter of Coleman Street appeared . But both were created at the end of the 1650s. In 1659, Cowley briefly returned to the royal family in France, but his loyalty was doubted , not least because of his distance from his political works in the foreword to Poems . When the monarchy was reinstated in 1660, he was back in London.

The last few years

Cowley became a shareholder in Duke's Theater, where he worked with William Davenant . Cutter of Coleman Street performed both there and at court prior to publication. He was now also increasingly concerned with science. His 1661 essay A Proposition for the Advancvement of Learning, published in 1661, contains a detailed plan for establishing an educational and research institution that was instrumental in establishing the Royal Society . Cowley's last volume of poetry, Verses, upon Several Occasions was published in 1663 . Then he retired to the country, first to Barnes , later to Chertsey. Here he wrote the remaining four volumes of the six-volume Plantarum . The first two were published as early as 1662.

He planned to write more essays, but his health was deteriorating. Cowley suffered from diabetes and died of pneumonia at the age of 49. He was buried on August 3, 1667 in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey .

reception

Frontispiece and title of the 5th edition of the complete edition, 1678

In 1675, at the instigation of the Duke of Buckingham, a memorial to him was erected at his grave. In the year after his death, in addition to an edition of his Latin poems, a first complete edition appeared, which saw 15 editions in the following decades. Despite the great popularity of the poet during his lifetime and in the early days after his death, he was gradually forgotten.

The criticism of John Donne and the metaphysical poets who followed him, especially by Samuel Johnson , one of the most influential scholars and literary critics of the time, was also Cowley's undoing. Against the background of this literary-critical tradition, even in recent reception history, he is not regarded as being on a par with other poets of the early modern period such as Edmund Spenser or John Donne .

For Cowley's poetic oeuvre, however, speaks the fact that Samuel Johnson, regardless of his reservations about Cowley's poetic style, just like John Dryden in the succession, could not help but accord this author their respect, if not their enthusiasm.

His poem "Der Weiberfreund" was set to music by Franz Schubert (D. 271)

literature

  • Thomas O. Calhoun: Abraham Cowley . In: Dictionary of Literary Biography , Vol. 131. Farmington Hills: Thomson Gale 1993, pp. 61-72
  • Ruth Monreal: Flora Neolatina. The Hortorum libri IV by René Rapin SJ and the Plantarum libri VI by Abraham Cowley. Two 17th century Latin seals . De Gruyter, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-11-021761-2

Web links

Commons : Abraham Cowley  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Burkhard Niederhoff: Cowley, Abraham . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present . Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, 4th exp. Edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , p. 136.
  2. ↑ Burkhard Niederhoff: Cowley, Abraham . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present . Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, 4th exp. Edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , p. 136.
  3. ↑ Burkhard Niederhoff: Cowley, Abraham . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present . Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, 4th exp. Edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , p. 136.
  4. ↑ Burkhard Niederhoff: Cowley, Abraham . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present . Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, 4th exp. Edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , p. 136f. For Johnson's appreciation, see also his concluding remarks in The Life of Abraham Cowley (1779) as part of Johnson's three-volume work The Lives of the Poets (1779–1781), accessible online on the University of Virginia website [1] . Retrieved May 7, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Cowley, Abraham
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English poet
DATE OF BIRTH 1618
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH July 28, 1667
Place of death Chertsey , Surrey