Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)

Michael Edson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wyoming and associate editor of Eighteenth-Century Life. His articles have appeared in Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Eighteenth Century, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. His edited book, Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Lehigh University Press), appeared in 2017. He is currently working on a book about error and ignorance in the reading of topical satire. Cedric Reverand, George Duke Humphrey Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Wyoming, specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature. He has published extensively in that area, especially on Dryden and Pope, but also on art, architecture, and music. He is currently the general editor of Eighteenth-Century Life.

• Introduction Michael Edson and Cedric D. Reverand II 1 “Who Now Reads Cowley?”: How a Major Poet Disappeared from the Canon Cedric D. Reverand II 2 Ease, Confidence, Difficulty, and Grasshoppers: Abraham Cowley’s Segmented Baroque Kevin L. Cope 3 Sacred Calm: The Digressions of Cowley’s Davideis Ian Calvert 4 “Verse Loitring into Prose”: Abraham Cowley’s Prosimetric Ode Joshua Swidzinski 5 Black Comedy and Futility: Cowley’s Notes to the Davideis Adam Rounce 6 “More Famous by His Pen than by His Sword”: Weaponizing the Classics in Abraham Cowley’s The Civil War Caroline Spearing 7 Cowley’s Essays: Martial and the Ironies of Retirement Michael Edson 8 Abraham Cowley’s Six Books of Plants and the Diversification of Textual Authority Katarzyna Lecky 9 Cowley’s Singularity: Pindaric Odes and Johnsonian Values Philip Smallwood