1 - “Scientifick Versification”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2022
Summary
Abraham Cowley offers his nearest equivalent to an ars poetica in one of the notes to Pindarique Odes:
Poetry treats not only of all things that are, or can be, but makes Creatures of her own, as Centaurs, Satyrs, Faires, &c. makes persons and actions of her own, as in Fables and Romances, makes Beasts, Trees, Waters, and other irrational and insensible things to act above the possibility of their natures, as to understand and speak, nay makes what Gods it pleases too without Idolatry, and varies all these into innumerable Systemes, or Worlds of Invention.
Here Cowley seems to echo Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie(1595), which explains how
the Poet […] doth grow in effect into an other nature: in making things either better then nature bringeth foorth, or quite a new, formes such as never were in nature: as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chymeras, Furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely raunging within the Zodiack of his owne wit.
Stressing “above […] possibility,” Cowley also counters Hobbes's Answer […] to Sir Will. D’Avenant's Preface before “Gondibert” (1651), which “dissenting onely from those that thinke the Beauty of a Poeme consisteth in the exorbitancy of the fiction” issues this ruling: “Beyond the actuall workes of nature a Poet may now go; but beyond the conceaved possibility of nature never.” Cowley's views about poetry nonetheless fluctuated so extremely that he judged “exorbitancy” sometimes essential to it and at other times fatal.
His biblical epic Davideis, which he abandoned after completing four of its projected 12 books, strays from its source material in the Old Testament to depict a Baconian academy in the shape of “A College […] where at greatProphets feet /The Prophets Sons with silent dili’gence meet, /By Samuel built, and mod’erately endow’ed.” Cowley justifies the plausibility of such a passage with one of his many notes: “The Description of the Prophets Colledge at Naioth, looks at first sight, as if I had taken the pattern of it from ours at the Universities; but the truth is, ours (as many other Christian customs) were formed after the example of the Jews.” He also explains how “Sons of the Prophets” might warrant such labeling “in the sense that the Greeks term Physitians […] Sons of the Physitians.”
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- Four Augustan Science Poets: Abraham Cowley, James Thomson, Henry Brooke, Erasmus Darwin , pp. 1 - 26Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020