COWLEY, ABRAHAM (1618-1667), English poet, was born in the City of London, the son of a stationer. While he was still at Westminster school, his poetical Blossoms, containing some remarkable work, appeared. He went up to Trinity College, Cam bridge, and in his first year there produced a Latin comedy. On March 1641, his comedy The Guardian, recast and printed in 1663 as The Cutter of Colman Street, was acted at Trinity before Prince Charles, afterwards Charles II. About this time he wrote his Davideis (printed in 1656), an epic in rhymed heroic verse.
Cowley became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, but was ejected by the Parliamentarians in 1643. He made his way to Oxford, where he enjoyed the friendship of Lord Falkland, and obtained the personal confidence of the royal family. After the battle of Marston Moor he followed the queen to Paris, and the exile so commenced lasted 12 years. On behalf of the Stuarts he performed several dangerous journeys into Jersey, Scotland, Flanders and Holland. He ciphered and deciphered with his own hand the greater part of all the letters that passed between Henri etta Maria and Charles I. In 1647 a collection of his love verses, entitled The Mistress, was published, and in the next year a spurious volume of satires, The Four Ages of England, was brought out under his name. On his return to England in 1656, he published a volume of his collected poetical works, which in cluded the Pindarique Odes, the Davideis, The Mistress, and some Miscellanies. Among the latter are to be found Cowley's most vital pieces. This section of his work opens with the famous aspiration: What shall I do to be for ever known, And make the coming age my own? It contains elegies on Wotton, Vandyck, Falkland, William Her vey and Crashaw, the last two being among Cowley's finest poems; the amusing ballad of The Chronicle, giving a fictitious catalogue of his supposed amours; various gnomic pieces; and some charming paraphrases from Anacreon. The Pindarique Odes contain weighty lines and passages. 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 con temporaries, immediately fell into disesteem. The Mistress was the most popular poetic reading of the age, and is now the least read of all Cowley's works. It was the last and most violent expression of the amatory affectation of the 17th century.
Soon after his return to England he was seized in mistake for another person, and only obtained his liberty on a bail of f I,000. Late in 1658 Cowley took advantage of the confusion after the death of Cromwell to escape to Paris, where he remained until the Restoration brought him back in Charles's train. He pub lished in 1663 Verses upon several occasions, in which The Com plaint is included.
Through his friend, Lord St. Albans, Cowley obtained a prop erty near Chertsey, and here, devoting himself to the study of botany, and buried in his books, he lived in comparative solitude until his death. He took a great and practical interest in experi mental science, and his pamphlet on The Advancement of Experi mental Philosophy (1661) advocated the foundation of the Royal Society, to which body Cowley, in March 1667, at the suggestion of Evelyn, addressed an ode which is the latest and one of the strongest of his poems. He died in the Porch House, in Chertsey, on July 28, 1667, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His Poemata Latina, including six books "Plantarum," were printed in 1668.
As a prose writer, and especially as an essayist, he holds, and will not lose, a high position in literature; as a poet Johnson justly said of him that "if he left versification yet improveable, he left likewise from time to time such specimens of excellence as enabled succeeding poets to improve it." BIBLIOGRAPHY.—The works of Cowley were collected in 1668, when Bibliography.—The works of Cowley were collected in 1668, when Thomas Sprat, afterwards bishop of Rochester, brought out a splendid edition in folio, to which he prefixed a life of the poet. A Second Part containing the early works was added in 1681. There were many reprints of this collection, which formed the standard edition till 188i, when A. B. Grosart edited Cowley's works in two volumes, for the Chertsey Worthies library. Cowley's Poems and Essays were edited by A. R. Waller (19o5 and 1906) ; other partial editions are: A. B. Gough, Essays and other prose writings (1915) ; Essays, ed. J. Rawson Lumby, revised by A. Tilley (1923) ; The Mistress, with other select poems, ed. J. Sparrow (1926) ; Anacreon done into English, by A. Cowley and S.B. (1923) .