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Leighton Library has a 1656 first edition of "Poems: I. Miscellanies. II. The mistress, or, Love verses. III. Pindarique odes. And IV. Davideis" by Abraham Cowley
Added at 07:00 on 28 July 2025
The Leighton Library has a 1656 first edition of poems by one of the leading English poets of the 17th century, Abraham Cowley, who died #OnThisDay 28 July 1667. The Leighton Library has "Poems: I. Miscellanies. II. The mistress, or, Love verses. III. Pindarique odes. And IV. Davideis".
Miscellanies is a showcase of Cowley’s intellectual range, including elegies, gnomic verse, and translations from Horace and Martial. These poems are dense with wit, learned allusions, and philosophical musings.
The Mistress is a collection of love verses that epitomise the elaborate stylised courtship poetry of the era, though Cowley was famously reserved in real life.
Pindarique Odes contain Cowley’s adaptations of Pindar’s work with a different metrical structure which became known as the “Cowleyan Ode” - a form of irregular, free-flowing stanzas that influenced poets like Dryden and Wordsworth.
Davideis is an unfinished biblical epic on the life of King David, blending classical epic conventions with scriptural themes. Cowley claimed it was the first “Divine Poem” in English to imitate Virgil’s half-lines and insert lyric psalm paraphrases within epic narrative
This edition contains the preface where he renounces his loyalty to the crown (having for 12 years previously engaged in being the messenger between the exiled King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria, creating and deciphering coded messages for them), and advocates the “Art of Oblivion” - a rhetorical gesture of submission to Cromwell’s regime.
