Abraham Cowley's 'Plantarum Libri Sex' : a cavalier poet and the classical canon
Abraham Cowleyâs Plantarum Libri Sex (1662 and 1668), a polymetric Latin poem of some 7,000 lines by a major English poet of the Interregnum and early Restoration, exists in no modern edition or translation and has received very little critical attention. This thesis demonstrates that the Plantarum deserves wider study. Showing how the workâs complex and nuanced interaction with classical intertexts is brought to bear on contemporary literary and political concerns, it aims to establish the poem as an important work by a writer at the heart of seventeenth-century literary and political activity. In the Introduction, I briefly describe Cowleyâs life and work before contextualising the Plantarum in terms of neo-Latin and English literature and surveying existing scholarship. Chapter 1 looks at the elegiac books 1-2 (1662) in terms of their Ovidian intertext, relating Cowleyâs poetics of change both to the Fasti and Metamorphoses and to the political upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century. Chapter 2 considers books 3-4 in terms of their Horatianism and of the allusions to Caroline masque generated through use of the Chloris/Flora/Henrietta Maria identification. Rather than a Royalist retreat, Floraâs
Spearing, Caroline Jane Ibbetson
Abraham Cowley's 'Plantarum Libri Sex' : a cavalier poet and the classical canon. Abraham Cowleyâs Plantarum Libri Sex (1662 and 1668), a polymetric Latin poem of some 7,000 lines by a major English poet of the Interregnum and early Restoration, exists in no modern edition or translation and has received very little critical attention. This thesis demonstrates that the Plantarum deserves wider study. Showing how the workâs complex and nuanced interaction with classical intertexts is brought to bear on contemporary literary and political concerns, it aims to establish the poem as an important work by a writer at the heart of seventeenth-century literary and political activity. In the Introduction, I briefly describe Cowleyâs life and work before contextualising the Plantarum in terms of neo-Latin and English literature and surveying existing scholarship. Chapter 1 looks at the elegiac books 1-2 (1662) in terms of their Ovidian intertext, relating Cowleyâs poetics of change both to the Fasti and Metamorphoses and to the political upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century. Chapter 2 considers books 3-4 in terms of their Horatianism and of the allusions to Caroline masque generated through use of the Chloris/Flora/Henrietta Maria identification. Rather than a Royalist retreat, Floraâs
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