Abraham was the English writer Abraham Cowley was among the first to use the Pindaric ode form in English poetry.
He contributed importantly to the development of the familiar essay in English.
Background
Abraham Cowley was born in the City of London in 1618. His father, a wealthy citizen, who died shortly before his birth, was a stationer. His mother was wholly given to works of devotion, but it happened that there lay in her parlor a copy of The Faerie Queene. This became the favorite reading of her son, and he had read it twice before he was sent to school.
Education
Cowley's education at Westminster School enabled him to add a new section, Sylva, in 1636 and to compose an unacted pastoral comedy, Love's Riddle (1638). In 1637 Cowley was elected into Trinit and where his particular friends were William Hervey and Richard Crashaw.
y College, Cambridge, where he betook himself with enthusiasm to the study of all kinds of learning, and early distinguished himself as a ripe scholarIt is bright and amusing, in the style common to the " sons " of Ben Jonson, the university wits who wrote more for the closet than the public stage. The learned quiet of the young poet's life was broken up by the Civil War; he warmly espoused the royalist side.
Career
Cowley early gave signs of becoming a literary prodigy. As early as 1628, that is, in his tenth year, he composed his Tragicall History of Piramus and Thisbe, an epical romance written in a six-line stanza, of his own invention. It is not too much to say that this work is the most astonishing feat of imaginative precocity on record; it is marked by no great faults of immaturity, and possesses constructive merits of a very high order. Two years later the child wrote another and still more ambitious poem, Constantia and Philetus, being sent about the same time to Westminster school. But the chief testimony of his fidelity was the laborious service he underwent in maintaining the constant correspondence between the late king and the queen his wife. The "Leonora" of The Chronicle is said to have been theonly woman he ever loved, and she married the brother of his biographer, Sprat. Soon after his return to England he was seized in mistake for another person, and only obtained his liberty on a bail of ?1000. The style is not without resemblance to that of Randolph, whose earliest works, however, were at that time only just printed. It was about this time that he composed his scriptural epic on the history of King David, one book of which still exists in the Latin original, the rest being superseded in favour of an English version in four books, called the Davideis, which he published a long time after. This his most grave and important work is remarkable as having suggested to Milton several points which he afterwards made use of. The epic, written in a very dreary and turgid manner, but in good rhymed heroic verse, deals with the adventures of King David from his boyhood to the smiting of Amalek by Saul, where it abruptly closes. In 1638 Love's Riddle and a Latin comedy, the Naufragium Joculars, were printed, and in 1641 the passage of Prince Charles through Cambridge gave occasion to the production of another dramatic work, The Guardian, which was acted before the royal visitor with much success. During the civil war this play was privately performed at Dublin, but it was not printed till 1650.
After the battle of Marston Moor he followed the queen to Paris, and the exile so commenced lasted twelve years. He became confidential agent to Queen Henrietta Maria and handled most of the coded correspondence between her and Charles I in England and managed a vast intelligence in many other parts, which for some years together took up all his days, and two or three nights every week. " During his exile he met with the works of Pindar, and determined to reproduce their lofty lyric passion in English. 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. In 1654 he was sent to London on a mysterious diplomatic mission, and in 1655 was arrested at the order of Oliver Cromwell. In spite of the troubles of the times, so fatal to poetic fame, his reputation steadily increased, and when, on his return to England in 1656, he published a volume of his collected poetical works, he found himself without a rival in public esteem. This volume included the later works already mentioned, 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 works 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 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 Pindarique Odes contain weighty lines and passages, buried in irregular and inharmonious masses of moral verbiage. Not more than one or two are good throughout, but a full posy of beauties may easily be culled from them. 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. In 1658 he revised and altered his play of The Guardian, and prepared it for the press under the title of The Cutter of Coleman Street, but it did not appear until 1663. He published in 1663 Verses upon several occasions, in which The Complaint is included. Wearied with the broils and fatigues of a political life, Cowley obtained permission to retire into the country; through his friend, Lord St Albans, he obtained a property-near Chertsey, and here, devoting himself to the study of botany, and buried in his books, he lived in comparative solitude until his death. On the 3rd of 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. His Poemata Latina, including six books " Plantarum, " were printed in 1668. Throughout their parallel lives the fame of Cowley completely eclipsed that of Milton, but posterity instantly and finally reversed the judgment of their contemporaries. The poetry of Cowley rapidly fell into a neglect as unjust as the earlier popularity had been. There were many reprints of this collection, which formed the standard edition till 1881, when it was superseded by A. B. Grosart's privately printed edition in two volumes, for the Chertsey Worthies library. The Essays have frequently been revived with approval.
Membership
He was a member of the Royal Society.
Personality
Abraham appears to have been of a cold, or at least of a timid, disposition; in the face of these elaborately erotic volumes, we are told that to the end of his days he never summoned up the courage to speak of love to a single woman in real life.