Abraham Cowley against Bacon's "Idols of the Mind"
This essay examines the contributions of Abraham Cowley's poetry to the development of Royal Society scientific methods in the seventeenth century, particularly through Cowley's clarification of the forms of cognitive bias that Francis Bacon called "idols of the mind." We should understand many of Cowley's poetic choices and stylistic recommendations as part of an effort to illustrate and shape the cognitive habits necessary for experimental science in the Baconian tradition. Beyond stylistic recommendations, Cowley was interested in understanding what makes for accurate perception and reasoned judgment, both of which were essential to poets and experimental scientists alike in this formative period. This essay places Cowley's poetry in the context of seventeenth-century conventions for style and perception among experimental scientists and concludes by examining how Thomas Sprat, Royal Society historian and Cowley's literary executor, understood the value of Cowley's poetry to Royal Society epistemological aims.
Abraham Cowley was one of seventeenth-century England's most prolific poets. He was also an unlikely but important figure in the rise of experimental science in the period. In the preface to Poems (1656), Cowley imagined that his pursuit of the "bewitching Art" of poetry might have been a lost opportunity to explore "the richer Sciences."1 [End Page 51] One shouldn't confuse his early modern usage of "sciences" to mean what today we call the natural sciences. Cowley wasn't saying—at least not explicitly—that he ought to have been a botanist or a chemist. But he was saying that he might have pursued some other intellectual activity to greater satisfaction and, perhaps, to ensure a greater legacy. Indeed, though he continued to write poetry to the end of his life, he earned a doctorate of medicine at Oxford in 1657 and would go on to study botany in retirement.
It's tempting to understand Cowley's perplexing statement about poetry as the sort of modesty pose that was then common in prefaces to poetic volumes. However, in the contexts of Cowley's subsequent poetry and the way his literary executor, Thomas Sprat, discussed it in the collection Works of Abraham Cowley (1668), it's clear that Cowley did view his early poetic career with a tinge of regret. His ode "To the Royal Society" (1667) laments the harmful effects of "wanton Wit" and "the Desserts of Poetry" on the health of natural philosophy ("natural philosophy" being the early modern term for scientific work).2 Cowley certainly expressed ambivalence about poetry and, as Charles Butler writes, "only in the context of such ambivalence can we understand Sprat's observation that Cowley 'had a firmness and strength of mind, that was of proof against the Art of Poetry it self.'"3
The image of the poet Cowley as a poetry apostate is a little too tidy. Robert Hinman, a foremost scholar of Cowley, goes so far as to call the idea that Cowley turned against poetry "a libel."4 In what follows, I show that despite signs of regret, Cowley did see some of his poetry as capable of working in favor of the Royal Society and its brand of experimental science that he so admired. He joined the Royal Society in 1662, the year it was established.5 The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (typically shortened to "Royal Society") [End Page 52] was England's primary institutional proponent of experimental science but had to convince a skeptical public that the work of its members amounted to more than the esoteric hobbies of bored gentlemen. The battleground on which the poet could fight under the banner of science was one of the key battlegrounds for the Royal Society's "spiritual founder," Francis Bacon: the idols of the mind.6
In the Novum Organum (new organon) (1620), Bacon identified four "kinds of illusions which block men's minds." He named these the "idols of the tribe," "idols of the cave," "idols of the marketplace," and "idols of the theatre." According to Bacon, each of these idols stood in the way of the advancement of knowledge. Idols of the tribe are "founded in human nature itself" and concern aspects of how our minds and senses work that leave all humans open to deception, including a tendency to place too much trust in sense perception and its capacity to mirror to us the physical reality of the world. Idols of the cave are "the illusions of the individual" and concern biases we form through individual experience, reading and education, and the people we admire. Idols of the marketplace arise "from human exchange and community" and concern the ways the language we use to communicate and explain things can mislead us. Finally, idols of the theatre concern "all the philosophies that men have learned or devised," which Bacon compares to "so many plays produced and performed which have created false and fictitious worlds."7
Because Bacon's idols were matters of perception, psychology, and language, poetry was a viable and valuable way of addressing them. Sprat asked Cowley to write an ode, "To the Royal Society," as the opening piece of Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667), a key public relations text aimed at convincing readers of the Royal Society's value. Bacon himself included poetry—with the exceptions of lyric and satire—among "the principal branches of learning."8 Though Bacon understood that poetry was not part of measurable or falsifiable knowledge, he believed, as Hinman notes, "the poet takes the phenomena of the physical world for his materials, but . . . transmutes them into creations the physical world does not offer."9 For this reason Bacon has been, perhaps counterintuitively, one of the early modern period's most powerful advocates of the poetic imagination. In De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623) he wrote: "Poesy seems to bestow upon human nature [End Page 53] those things which history denies to it; and to satisfy the mind with the shadows of things when the substance cannot be obtained."10
Cowley understood that poetry could illustrate certain practices—word choice and the construction and treatment of poetic images, especially—that guard against Bacon's idols of the tribe and idols of the marketplace in particular, those that concern overreliance on sense perception and the pitfalls of language. As Claire Preston observes, "Cowley's complex Baconian amalgam of tropic practice and anti-tropic claims is neither self-consuming nor inconsistent, nor did it ruin or demote the poetic expression of nature."11 That is, like Bacon and his Royal Society acolytes in the latter half of the seventeenth century, Cowley was not expressly against metaphor or figurative language, but was cautious about excessive uses of them. Poetry became for Cowley a way of demonstrating—not unlike one of the Royal Society's scientific demonstrations—how to use language in epistemically fruitful and responsible ways.
Scholars have certainly observed Cowley's interest in writing poems with significant scientific content, but with an over-emphasis on what his poems are about, rather than how he put his poems to use toward the Royal Society's linguistic objectives (which, as I discuss in the next section, were inextricable from the Royal Society's epistemological objectives). Much scholarly work assesses Cowley's science poetry in terms of its capacity for verisimilitude, for mirroring the natural world in verse. Mary Elizabeth Green, for example, claims Cowley thought poetry should be "about plants and trees, about raising sheep and hop gardens, about men and manners and the discoveries of Newton" (even though the discoveries of Newton were published well after Cowley's death).12 Joanna Picciotto describes Cowley's poetry as "a vehicle for truth claims rather than fictions."13 Joseph Wallace argues that Cowley's Davideis (1656) likens the distinction between "true and false religion" to "true and false poetry," aligning Cowley's interest in writing about truth with the Royal Society.14 Christopher D'Addario summarizes this line of inquiry, noting "many readers of [End Page 54] Cowley's mid-career poems . . . have largely emphasized the rational empiricism that underlies his poetic style and philosophical stances."15 There's also a rich body of work on the influence of Bacon's thought on Cowley's poetry; Achsah Guibbory's "Imitation and Originality: Cowley and Bacon's Vision of Progress" is an exemplary article in this vein. But my interest here points in the other direction: What might Cowley have contributed to Royal Society experimental science?
All the above claims about what Cowley's poetry was doing have merit, but the value of Cowley's poetry to Royal Society epistemology went beyond its aboutness—writing about science or creating poetic descriptions that mirror nature—and can only be understood with reference to Bacon's idols. We can see this not only in a number of Cowley's poems, but also in Sprat's reading of Cowley's poetry in his critical introduction to the collection Works of Abraham Cowley (1668), published after Cowley's death. As Cowley's literary executor, Sprat was tasked with gathering and reflecting on Cowley's poetic oeuvre. As author of the influential History of the Royal Society—as I've suggested, a key public-relations text for the early Royal Society—Sprat was as attuned as any to the various facets of the Royal Society's scientific project. Sprat's critical introduction to Works offers a perspective—beyond Cowley's reflections on his own work and our readings of Cowley—of how a Royal Society member and chronicler understood what Cowley's poetry was doing for the Royal Society.
In particular, Cowley's poetry provided conceptual tools for distinguishing between acts of fancy and judgment in observation and perception. As Tita Chico notes, the Royal Society micrographer Robert Hooke acknowledged the necessity of expert judgment or discrimination in making sense of observed particulars, evinced in Hooke's use of adjectives such as "scrupulous," "strict," "choice," and "examination" to describe the natural philosopher's "discriminating eye." As Chico explains, "minute particulars require both the learned—and at some level subjective—analysis of the experimental philosopher, gained from study and experience of experimentation, as well as the experimental philosopher's 'severe' and 'impartial diligence.'"16 Cowley's poetry frequently dwelled on moments of apprehension and judgment, and worked to illuminate and clarify pitfalls associated with such moments. Judgment (in the sense that Hooke understood it) [End Page 55] is a way to counteract Bacon's idols of the tribe, taking care not to trust too easily what we perceive with our senses. Concordantly, Royal Society members saw judicious use of language as crucial for combating idols of the tribe and idols of the marketplace, the latter arising from excesses of figurative language. Here, even in making use of figurative language, Cowley's poetry could intervene.
Between Style and Method
The question for Cowley as a poet interested in experimental science—especially late in his life—became how stylistic choices might aid or promote verse led by linguistic and conceptual judgment, not rhetoric. As Mary Poovey observes, much of what might pass as methodological intervention in Royal Society writing actually turns out to be stylistic intervention, which is to say Cowley was writing during a period in which style and method had considerable overlap.17
Though Bacon, Sprat, and Cowley undoubtedly prioritized the "thing itself" in scientific work—the idea that one should form conclusions about the natural world by experimenting on physical things, rather than through "discourse and disputation," as Hooke put it in his preface to Micrographia (1665)—they analogously prioritized judgment over rhetoric in their stylistic recommendations.18 Because, as Preston writes, "headway in early-modern science was often analogical . . . [and] its insights and expression had the structure of a rhetorical figure," language that clarified or illuminated concepts or analogies was crucial for scientific progress.19 Poetry played a key role in the development of scientific insight and matters of fact, so long as it avoided excesses of what Sprat called the "trick of Metaphor, this volubility of Tongue."20 As Brian Vickers notes, Sprat has often been misread as seeking to reify language or to suggest it must index things or physical matter, when he famously (and approvingly) wrote of "when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words."21 Here, per Vickers, Sprat was actually endorsing "the classical belief in a proper economy of style," expressing not just a desired ratio for words to things named but, as Sprat writes, a "natural way of speaking; [End Page 56] positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness," a preference for "the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, or Wits, or Scholars."22
This is a crucial observation for understanding Cowley's poetry for two reasons in particular: 1) even proponents of experimental science, such as Bacon, and their heralds, such as Sprat, believed words could be usefully employed—even figuratively—to elucidate concepts and clarify subject matter, not just to reference things in the physical world; and 2) clarifying how Cowley's poetry fit into seventeenthcentury ideas about scientific style and method directly addresses the charge, frequently leveled in subsequent scholarship on Cowley, that his late-career ode, "To the Royal Society" (1667), signified a turn against poetry, the poetic image, and metaphor, particularly in his characterization of poetry as "desserts" less nourishing for philosophy than the "solid meats" of experimental science (lines 21–22). If Cowley believed poetic and epistemic clarity were only possible when words directly correspond to things, then his poeticizing with what Samuel Johnson dismissively called "conceits" would certainly seem at odds with Royal Society stylistic and epistemic aims, giving rise to the kind of scholarly speculation we have seen about Cowley as a poetry apostate.23 Johnson was correct when he wrote in Idler 77 that Cowley's "pursuit of remote thoughts led him often into harshness of expression," because much of Cowley's verse practice gave priority—though with exceptions—both to conceptual clarity and to economy of expression, and was therefore driven by concepts, from which expression was forced to follow.24 As Arthur Nethercot suggests, although Cowley was typical of seventeenth-century writers on matters of style in thinking—following Aristotle's Rhetoric—that different subject matter called for different styles of writing, Cowley had "always written more or less in the 'new' style" of the Royal Society.25 This was principally the case in his prose, but his poetry also evinces Royal Society stylistic virtues. [End Page 57]
Judgment against the Idols
When Cowley lost his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1643, he first took refuge with other royalists in Oxford, eventually joining the company of the royal family before following them (and his patron, the courtier and politician Henry Jermyn) to Henrietta Maria's court in Paris. There Cowley became part of William Cavendish's circle, which included Renee Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Hobbes, among others.26 Cowley's time in the Cavendish circle is important context not only for his poems "Of Wit" and "To Mr. Hobs" (1656), but also for how we contextualize Cowley's poetic negotiation of fancy, wit, and judgment, all of which were important concepts in the period both for science and poetry. As Quentin Skinner observes, Hobbes made a sharp distinction between the mental faculties of "fancy" and "wit" and those leading reliably to truth claims. Hobbes saw "fancy" as, in Skinner's words, "a product of two conjoined qualities," a quick-ranging, seeking mind (which Hobbes compares with spaniels seeking out a scent) and a tendency to compare "the various images that swarm into the mind as it ranges over the memories contained within it." The consequence is that, as Hobbes puts it, we find "unexpected similitude in things," producing "Similies, Metaphors, and other Tropes." Accordingly, as Skinner notes, Hobbes was one of the earliest writers in English to use the word "imagery" to refer to figures of speech, and the mental imagery we produce has the capacity to make us see things other than as they truly are.27 This is the basis of Hobbes's distinction between fancy and wit as imagery-generating faculties of mind and "judgment" as the mental faculty that points us in the direction of knowledge. As Roger Lund explains, for Hobbes, "the products of wit were by definition less dependable than the products of judgement precisely because wit derived from the apprehension of apparent similarity."28
In Cowley's prose as well as his poetry we have evidence of a Hobbesian mentality when it comes to this problem of our cognitive capacities to rove across apprehensions and memories and produce apparent similarities. In the essay "Of Greatness," for example, Cowley writes: "greatness has no reality in nature, but is a creature of the [End Page 58] fancy—a notion that consists only in relation and comparison."29 In his preface to Poems (1656), explaining his choice to exclude from the edition the poems he wrote "during the time of the late troubles," on grounds that "we must lay down our Pens as well as Arms" after battle, he distinguishes between "all the Works and Fortifications of Wit and Reason by which we defended it," reproducing a Hobbesian dichotomy of wit and reason.30 Elsewhere Cowley repudiates tropes and metaphors for forging tenuous connections. Even as he frequently employed figurative and analogical language in his poetry—just as Royal Society experimentalists did in their prose—he participated in the wider "revolt . . . against the excesses of baroque style" characteristic of the second half of the seventeenth century.31 In "An Answer to a Copy of Verses Sent Me to Jersey" (1651), for example, Cowley writes, "Alas! To bring your tropes and figures here / Strange as to bring camels and elephants were."32
Among Cowley's poems, "Of Wit" (1639) is perhaps the most direct meditation on the relationship between wit and judgment and the implications of this relationship for poetic style. Cowley wrote "Of Wit" before he took express interest in Baconian natural philosophy and before he met Hobbes. Nevertheless, "Of Wit" evinces an awareness of the complex interplay of language and the cognitive faculties, which becomes a theme in much of Cowley's subsequent poetry. Cowley's stylistic recommendations in "Of Wit" have implications for the practice of judgment in the selection of metaphors and the construction of conceits, in both poetry and natural philosophy. Cowley takes up wit as a perilously capacious subject not unlike Hobbes's association of fancy and wit with the mind's tendency to rove and too readily to seek similarity between things. The seductive capaciousness of wit leads to deception and unreliability: "A thousand different shapes it bears, / Comely in a thousand shapes appears. / Yonder we saw it plain; and here 'tis now, / Like Spirits in a Place, we know not How."33
As the poem disambiguates wit, it associates excesses of wit and lapses of judgment with particular stylistic features. What I call here excesses of wit are things that, for Cowley, might pass as wit but are [End Page 59] marks of cumbersome poetry. For a poet "to force some lifeless Verses meet / With their five gowty feet" would be an overindulgence in fancy, the desire to find or force likeness in unlike things (line 23, lines 25–26). Nor should poetry be an effort to force words into metrical templates, nor a game of sounds: "'Tis not when two like words make up one noise; / Jests for Dutch Men, and English Boys. / In which who finds out Wit, the same may see / In An'grams and Acrostiques Poetrie" (lines 41–44). With an allusion to alchemy, Cowley calls jocular or ornamental poetry "Dross the Fire must purge away," because it requires the imposition of unnatural forms driven by pleasing sounds or language games, the search for similitude for its own sake (line 47). As Cowley reminds us, poetry must not "force some odd Similitude" (line 54). Verse that merely seeks to "adorn, and gild each part" shows "more Cost than Art" (lines 33–34). And a poet who reaches for "a tall Metaphor, in the Bombast way" has also gone astray (line 51). In such lines we get a clear repudiation of excessive wit and fancy, the mental faculties that supply our tendency to force likenesses and produce disanalogies. For Cowley this makes for bad poetry; for the Royal Society, it makes for bad science.
Cowley is aware that his stylistic recommendations here are general pronouncements about what not to do—"What is it then, which like the Power Divine / We only can by Negatives define?"—but he also makes an effort in "Of Wit" to link these stylistic pronouncements with faculties of mind, urging the poet to exercise judgment and reason. And here is where Cowley begins not just to point out the negative effects of what Bacon called idols of the mind, but also to combat them in the context of experimental science. Using metaphors from microscopy and astronomy, Cowley aligns artistic and scientific judgment. "For men led by the Colour and the Shape," Cowley writes, "Like Zeuxes Birds fly to the painted Grape," warning that to neglect the filter of judgment will lead one to a false sense of reality, a mere copy or likeness of the thing itself (lines 11–12). "Some things do through our Judgment pass," warns Cowley, "As through a Multiplying Glass. / And sometimes, if the Object be too far, / We take a Falling Meteor for a Star" (lines 13–16). In "Of Wit," the stylistic recommendations for poetry—and the habits of mind for the poet—mirror the emphasis that experimentalists such as Robert Hooke placed on the expert judgment of the experimenter in apprehending sense data, the experimentalist's "impartial diligence."34
Even as Cowley recognizes that judgment is an imperfect faculty through which things may pass unscrutinized, particularly given our [End Page 60] position relative to what we aim to observe or understand, neglecting judgment or being led too easily by "the Colour and the Shape" of things leads the poet into verse led by rhetoric and the observer into deception. For Cowley in "Of Wit," the solution to this dilemma is "All ev'ry where . . . Reason the Inferior Powers controul" (lines 27–28). As Bacon writes in the Novum Organum, "men believe that their reason controls words. But it is also true that their words retort and turn their force back upon the understanding; and this has rendered philosophy and the sciences sophistic and unproductive."35 In scrutinizing language choice as a matter of judgment susceptible to the temptations of wit, Cowley recognizes Bacon's problem with an overreliance on rhetoric and disputation in scientific inquiry.
Cowley's ode "To The Royal Society," the last major poem of his career, published in the year of his death, is his most explicit verse meditation on the relationship between poetic style and scientific method, and builds on "Of Wit" by addressing Bacon's idols head-on. Guibbory rightly observes that Cowley's images in this ode "specifically recall the language of Bacon's attacks on false philosophy," though Cowley also supplies in the ode some positive interventions in Baconian epistemology, some ideas about how to move beyond "false philosophy."36 The premise of "To the Royal Society" is that one of the poem's central characters, Philosophy (science anthropomorphized), has been poorly raised in his youth, "amusd . . . with the sports of wanton Wit," overfed with "the Desserts of Poetry / Instead of solid meats t'encreas his force," and entertained with "painted Scenes, and Pageants of the Brain" (lines 20, 21–22, 30).37 This is the view Cowley presents of the history of science until Bacon emerges as a righteous proponent of empiricism and experimentalism, a Moses figure drawing on "tru Reasons Light" to guide the wayward pupil Philosophy in healthier habits of body and mind: "Bacon, at last, a Mighty Man, arose / Whom a wise King and Nature chose" (lines 45, 37). Cowley is not subtle in introducing the central conflict in the ode, between antiquity's lax and verbose guardians of Philosophy who fail to facilitate his progress, and the heroic Bacon, who "chac'd out of our sight, / Nor suffer'd Living Men to be misled / By the vain shadows of the Dead" (lines 46–48). As the sight/light rhyme and "vain shadows" exemplify, Cowley's ode relies on what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call the [End Page 61] "thinking as perceiving" conceit throughout, reinforcing the Royal Society's guiding principle that sight brings us closer knowledge.38
The heart of Cowley's reflection on the problem of our senses—Bacon's idols of the tribe—comes in the fourth stanza, which again invokes the Zeuxis scene from Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia to develop an extended metaphor of knowledge, brought by Bacon, as "The thirsty Souls refreshing Wine," derived not from "painted Grapes," but from the fruits themselves (lines 78, 72).39 But we will also see how this stanza addresses Bacon's idols of the marketplace in its treatment of language. I include the whole of the fourth stanza below, as I will continually refer to parts of it in the context of the stanza as a whole:
From Words, which are but Pictures of the Thought,(Though we our Thoughts from them perversly drew) To Things, the Minds right Object, he it brought, Like foolish Birds to painted Grapes we flew; He sought and gather'd for our use the Tru; And when on heaps the chosen Bunches lay, He prest them wisely the Mechanic way, Till all their juyce did in one Vessel joyn, Ferment into a Nourishment Divine, The thirsty Souls refreshing Wine. Who to the life an exact Piece would make, Must not from others Work a Copy take; No, not from Rubens or Vandike; Much less content himself to make it like Th' Idaeas and the Images which ly In his own Fancy, or his Memory. No, he before his sight must place The Natural and Living Face; The real Object must command Each Judgment of his Eye, and Motion of his Hand.
(lines 69–88) [End Page 62]
Particularly following the Zeuxis reference, the idea of words as "but Pictures of the Thought" sounds ekphrastic in its presumptive conflation of word and picture, but a "picture of thought" here is neither an object nor a material image of one. Likewise, word as "picture of thought" does not describe the relationship between words and things. Rather than portraying a version of ekphrasis in which an object out in the world inspires poetry, Cowley uses the Zeuxis conceit to warn against the distortion potential of such an arrangement in which the thing described may yet be a derivative or a copy of the thing itself. If referentiality describes a causal relationship in which things are primary and give rise to words, Cowley describes a causal relationship of a different sort: thoughts come before words and make words necessary for signification. Yet in Cowley's extended metaphor, while thoughts come before words, thoughts themselves are not primary, but intermediary. The word "but" in "but Pictures of the Thought" performs a subordinating function in two directions, rendering words secondary to thoughts (words are merely derivative), but also rendering thoughts secondary to things (thoughts are merely placeholders for things). We see this in the transition enacted in lines 69–73:
From Words, which are but Pictures of the Thought,(Though we our Thoughts from them perversly drew)To Things, the Minds right Object, he it brought,Like foolish Birds to painted Grapes we flew;He sought and gather'd for our use the Tru;
The phrase "the Minds right Object" makes possible the transition from words to things that Bacon brings about by insinuating thought between words and things: that which takes its "right Object"—things themselves—is the mind.
Yet one is not out of the woods for having taken "the Minds right Object," because as Bacon and Hobbes argued, and as Cowley knew, the faculties of wit and fancy could lead one to force false similarities or draw false connections between memories and the images formed in the mind's eye when apprehending a thing in the world. In Bacon's terms, words don't simply mirror thoughts but can act upon them. Surrounding the transition to "the Minds right Object" is a rhyming pair of lines—"(Though we our Thoughts from them perversly drew)" and "Like foolish Birds to painted Grapes we flew"—that expresses Cowley's awareness of this problem. Cowley describes a triadic hierarchy of things, thoughts, and words by subordinating thoughts derived from words ("perversly drew") to thoughts derived from things and likening Zeuxis's deception ("Like foolish Birds to painted Grapes we flew") [End Page 63] to the practice of deriving thoughts from words (or memories, or representations) instead of things.
For Cowley, then, Bacon's gathering of "the Tru" knowledge becomes possible, not simply by choosing the right words to represent things nor by poeticizing about nature, but in two ways in particular: 1) by training thought on nature instead of words and then choosing words with judgment in mind (what Hooke called "impartial diligence"); and 2) by exercising judgment in the act of apprehension (as the Zeuxis conceit warns). In these ways, the rhetorical transition from words to things Cowley's poem enacts—a rhetorical move at the heart of conventional Royal Society writing, exemplified by the Society's motto, "Nullius in verba" (on the word of no one)—introduces thought as the essential, if sometimes wobbly, bridge between words and things. The guardian of thought is judgment.
Jeffrey Gore rightly suggests that in "To the Royal Society," Cowley "has penetrated much more deeply into the problem with rhetoric than Sprat does in his polemic against eloquence and much more deeply than Bacon's contemporary critics do."40 Cowley accomplishes this by triangulating judgment between words and things, as I've suggested above. This matters in particular because, as we see as the poem progresses, even words that describe objects in the world—such as still life paintings—can mislead when the objects they describe are derived or copied from things in nature. Here again it becomes crucial to exercise judgment as a poet as well as an observer:
Who to the life an exact Piece would make, Must not from others Work a Copy take; No, not from Rubens or Vandike; Much less content himself to make it like Th' Idaeas and the Images which ly In his own Fancy, or his Memory. No, he before his sight must place The Natural and Living Face; The real Object must command Each Judgment of his Eye, and Motion of his Hand.
(lines 79–88)
Cowley's lines concern not simply the dyadic relationship between originals and copies, nor things themselves and representations of things, but the triadic relationship between things, painter, and painting. Like the "Minds right Object" line, which insinuates a mental process between words and things, the "Judgment" of the painter's [End Page 64] eye mediates the object and the painting, the thing and its representation. And like Cowley's subtle construction of a hierarchy of things, thoughts, and words in the Zeuxis conceit, Cowley's still life conceit introduces the act of painting, like the act of thought or intellection, as intermediary requiring the kind of judgment practiced by the experimental scientist. The painter must not, on the one hand, draw from "Fancy, or his Memory." The enjambed lines "Th' Idaeas and Images which ly / In his own Fancy, or his Memory" emphasize the two contexts of "ly" here, both to occupy and to deceive. On the other hand, "The real Object" guides the intermediary act of painting, "the Motion" of the painter's "Hand" and the "Judgment of his Eye." This arrangement in the painting metaphor is analogous to the arrangement in the Zeuxis metaphor, in which the thing itself—"the Natural and Living Face; The real Object"—is primary, the conceptualization of the thing itself is intermediary, and the truth-value of the representation is contingent upon an intermediary "Judgment" arising from the apprehension of the thing itself. That is, referentiality, in word and in image, is not simply successful when words describe things or paintings portray things, but only when the mind takes its right object—the thing in nature—and we employ expert judgment in apprehending it. For this reason, Cowley's reference in line 83 to "Th' Ideas and Images which ly" is qualified in line 84 with "In his own Fancy, or his Memory," distinguishing between fanciful thoughts or unreliable memories—here analogous to the "perverse" derivation of thoughts from words in line 70—and judgments derived in apprehending things themselves.
As these two poems demonstrate, Cowley sought to tighten the poet's descriptive methodology for thoughts as well as things, acknowledging that countervailing the idols of the mind requires a conceptual methodology, a set of habits of mind. While we might understand Cowley's poetics as analogous to how his Royal Society colleagues sought to improve both images of nature and the prose style of natural philosophy writing, we should not mistake his aspirations for improving poetry for a rejection of poetry or of metaphorical language. For this reason, we must understand Cowley's poetry not only for its conceptual or philosophical import, but also for the stylistic issues it raises as inseparable from matters of scientific methodology: the necessity of judgment alike in the construction of poetic images, in poetic diction, and in apprehension of the natural world. Toward that end, the following (and final) section of this essay examines how Cowley's Royal Society colleague, Thomas Sprat, evaluated Cowley's poetry in light of the Royal Society's wider scientific objectives. Scholars have paid little attention to Sprat's reading of Cowley, [End Page 65] or how Sprat's framing of The Works of Abraham Cowley justifies our consideration of Works, alongside Sprat's History of the Royal Society and Hooke's Micrographia, as a major text of the Royal Society's self-fashioning.
Sprat Reading Cowley
Thomas Sprat, whom Cowley appointed his literary executor, published The Works of Abraham Cowley in 1668, shortly after Cowley's death. Sprat's edition of Cowley's work is revealing, not only because it charged Sprat with editorial decisions about Cowley's published and unpublished work, but also because it demonstrates how one member of the Royal Society responded to the literary output of another. Works is an instance of Royal Society literary criticism about Royal Society poetry. It illustrates not only the importance of Cowley's poetry to Royal Society epistemic and stylistic objectives, but also the extent to which Sprat observed Cowley following through on the ideas expressed in his poetry about style and judgment.
Works is remarkable too because of how much Sprat's commentary in his introduction, "Account of the Life and Writings of Abraham Cowley," aligns with the stylistic and methodological recommendations in Sprat's History and Hooke's Micrographia. That is, when we read Micrographia, History, and Works together with Cowley's poetry, we see across these different kinds of documents—penned for differing rhetorical situations—the building of common stylistic approaches to metaphor and description, as well as common ways of making exacting and judicious observations. In History, for example, Sprat reinforces much of the rhetoric of the visual employed in Hooke's Micrographia. "Disputing," writes Sprat, "is a very good instrument, to sharpen mens wits, and to make them versatile and wary defenders of the Principles, which they already know: but it can never much augment the solid substances of Science itself."41 Drawing on a similar metaphor to that which Cowley employs in "To the Royal Society" to describe the "nourishment" of wine Bacon provides for "thirsty Souls," Sprat describes the relation of verbal disputation to experimentation as "like Exercise to the Body in comparison to Meat," the former supporting health, but the latter deemed fundamentally necessary to "nourish" for growth.42 In this language we can also hear the echo of Cowley's "With the Desserts of Poetry they fed him / Instead of solid meats t'encreas his force," lines that might seem to disparage poetry at large, but reflect instead a problem of moderation: poetry [End Page 66] without judgment is no recipe for epistemic advancement (lines 21–22). Sprat, like Hooke, employs a range of metaphors in History for clarifying concepts and explaining his methodological interventions, including husbandry for the collective work experimental science requires ("it is in Philosophy, as in husbandry: [. . .] a few hands will serve to measure out, and fill into sacks, that Corn, which requires very many more laborers to sow, and reap, and bind.") and a closing representation of the scientist as the Creator, who "at first produc'd a confus'd and scatter'd Light; and reserv'd it to be the work of another day, to gather and fashion it into beautiful Bodies."43
In Works, Sprat reinforces the rhetorical principles of History and Micrographia through his reading of Cowley, reproducing not only some of the stylistic choices and figurative language from Cowley's poetry, but also some of Cowley's conceits for judgment and apprehension. Sprat describes Cowley's education in youth as "conversing with the Books themselves," gaining familiarity with "the most solid and unaffected Authors of Antiquity, which he fully digested not only in his memory but in his judgment." Here Sprat's description of Cowley recalls the Hobbesian distinction between judgment and fancy, the latter a function of the roving mind that seeks misleading connections between memories and sense data.44 Sprat makes clear that Cowley was an acute and experienced observer of things, one whose mind took its "right Object," as Cowley "had enjoyed many excellent occasions of Observation" (8).
In these descriptions Sprat locates in Cowley a confluence of both the stylistic and the methodological principles of the Royal Society. Cowley does not read or learn secondhand, but engages with "the Books themselves," with the Greek and Roman languages "not as a Scholar, but as a Native," and the authors Cowley reads and imitates are "solid and unaffected" (2–3). Sprat almost always attributes to Cowley a direct relationship with his objects of study and observation, aligning Cowley's scholarly and poetic practices with the Baconian ideal of knowing things themselves ("Books themselves") and being driven by judgment above the Ciceronian fixation on expression.
Sprat dedicates considerable attention to Cowley's word choice as a poet and an essayist, as well as to Cowley's poetic restraint. Sprat begins his assessment of Cowley's poetry with a general claim about how [End Page 67] Cowley chooses words: "If any shall think that he was not wonderfully curious in the choice and elegance of all his words: I will affirm with more truth on the other side, that he had no manner of affectation in them: he took them as he found them made to his hands; he neither went before, nor came after the use of the Age" (10). That Sprat is wary of the possibility that Cowley could be accused of writing verse without elegance is important to observe. Sprat reinforces this poetics of negative example when observing later in Works that Cowley "had a firmness and strength of mind that was proof against the Art of Poetry itself. Nothing vain or fantastical, nothing flattering or insolent appeared in his humour," echoing Cowley's disparagement of "some fantastic Fairy Land" of "Gods, Devils, Nymphs, Witches, and Gyants" in "To Sir William Davenant."45 For Sprat, poeticizing carried an inherent risk of fancy, of unnatural or affected verbosity, a risk that required judgment, a "firmness and strength of mind" to "take [words] as he found them" (10). This meant avoiding what Sprat took to be florid descriptions for their own sake or forced verse (such as "An'grams and Acrostiques Poetrie") (lines 41–44).
Observing how Cowley lets his diction follow from judgment, rather than a desire to write "flowing" and regular verse, Sprat relates Cowley's words to the integrity of "the Minds right Object," or the choice to take things as a source for poetry, not simply referentially, but as a guide in poetic invention: "If his Verses in some places seem not as soft and flowing as some would have them, it was his choice not his fault. He knew that in diverting mens minds, there should be the same variety observed as in the prospects of their Eyes: where a Rock, a Precipice, or a rising Wave, is often more delightful than a smooth, even ground, or a calm Sea" (10). When it comes to the "numerosity" of Cowley's verse, Sprat argues that Cowley chose to make metrical sacrifices—to allow for irregularities and unconventional contractions—in the service of "the higher Virtues" (10). As Sprat writes in defense of Cowley's poetic legacy,
This may serve to answer those who upbraid some of his Pieces with roughness, and with more contractions than they are willing to allow. But these Admirers of gentleness without sinews, should know that different Arguments must have different Colours of Speech: that there is a kind of variety of Sexes in Poetry, as well as in Mankind: that as the particular excellence of the Feminine Kind, is smoothness and beauty, so strength is the chief praise of the Masculine
(10).
According to Sprat, Cowley sacrifices "smoothness," "elegance," and regularity of meter in his poetry to allow for what Sprat frames as a [End Page 68] faithful rendering to the ways of nature, which contain both a feminized "smoothness and beauty" and a masculinized "strength."46 This is, for Sprat, how Cowley avoided forced likenesses or symmetries. Cowley performs this very idea at the beginning of "To The Royal Society," in which he interrupts a thought with an abrupt parenthetical aside to attribute masculine gender to philosophy:
Philosophy the great and only HeirOf all that Human Knowledge which has binUnforfieted by Mans rebellious Sin,Though full of years He do appear, Philosophy, I say, and call it, He,For whatsoe're the Painters Fancy be, It a Male Virtu seems to me)Has still been kept in Nonage til of late,
(lines 1–8).
The parenthetical aside functions on one hand as a gesture of what Cowley takes as accuracy, what he understands as the proper gender of philosophy personified, but on the other hand it constitutes both a thematic and metrical interruption. The aside breaks the description of philosophy as heir of human knowledge kept in nonage—the description with which the poem begins—and resets the meter with the repetition of "philosophy," which appears in the opening line of the poem. The aside about philosophy's gender, then, is a thematic shift—from the state of philosophy's progress to the character of philosophy personified—as well as a mid-sentence metrical break with the preceding lines. In History, Sprat makes a similar stylistic recommendation—privileging accuracy of thought over contrived regularity—using chivalric fiction as a counterexample: "To make that only to consist of strange and delightful Tales, is to render it nothing else but vain, and ridiculous Knight-Errantry. Yet we may avoid that extreme, and still leave room, to consider the singular, and irregular effects, and to imitate the unexpected, and monstrous excesses, which Nature does sometimes practice in her works."47
In these ways Sprat takes literary criticism of Cowley as an occasion [End Page 69] to further the wider stylistic and methodological aims of the Royal Society. Sprat's literary criticism in Works ought to be read and understood as an important continuation of what Hooke and Sprat set out to do in Micrographia and History. As we read Works, we can observe how Sprat finds himself following Cowley's recommendations in making broader aesthetic judgments about what verse ought to look and sound like, and therefore how the poet's judgment might align with that of the scientist. Though Sprat and Cowley both take experimental science as among the "higher Virtues," and both find pitfalls in the excesses of language, the poetry and criticism in Works demonstrate the value and coherence of Cowley's thinking in verse—his contributions to issues of style and judgment in poetry and beyond—to the Royal Society's larger stylistic and scientific missions. Sprat's reading of Cowley also demonstrates the confluence of Royal Society stylistic and methodological considerations. [End Page 70]
Aaron R. Hanlon is an associate professor of English and chair of the Science, Technology, and Society Department at Colby College. He is the author of A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism (U. Virginia Press, 2019), Empirical Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge U. Press, 2022), and co-editor of British Literature and Technology, 1600–1830 (Bucknell U. Press, 2023).
Footnotes
1. Quoted in Charles Butler, "The Stagirite and the Scarecrow: Stanza 3 of Cowley's 'Ode to the Royal Society,'" Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 21 (1997): p. 4. Cowley writes this in his preface to Poems (1656). All italicization in quoted text throughout this article reflects the source text as it originally appeared.
2. Hereafter, for the sake of clarity, I use our contemporary term "science" to stand in for the early modern term "natural philosophy."
3. Butler, "The Stagirite and the Scarecrow" (above, n. 1), p. 4.
4. Robert Hinman, "'Truth is Truest Poesy': The Influence of the New Philosophy on Abraham Cowley," ELH 23 (1956): p. 194. Recent studies have reconciled Cowley's critical language of the "desserts" of poetry with the Royal Society's broader rhetorical objectives, as in Jeffrey Gore, "Francis Bacon and the 'Desserts of Poetry,'" Prose Studies 29 (2007): 359–77; and Tina Skouen, "Science versus Rhetoric? Sprat's History of the Royal Society Reconsidered," Rhetorica 29 (2011): 23–52. For more on the question of whether Cowley turned against poetry and to what extent his poetry was compatible with Royal Society objectives, see Robert Hinman, Abraham Cowley's World of Order (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1960): 92–134.
5. Achsah Guibbory, "Imitation and Originality: Cowley and Bacon's Vision of Progress," SEL 29 (1989), p. 99.
6. Butler, "The Stagirite and the Scarecrow" (above, n. 1), p. 2.
7. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2000), 40–42.
8. Hinman, Abraham Cowley's World (above, n. 4), p. 103.
9. Ibid., 104–105.
10. Ibid., p. 104.
11. Claire Preston, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford U. Press, 2016), p. 16.
12. Mary Elizabeth Green, "The Poet in Solomon's House: Abraham Cowley as Baconian Apostle," Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 10 (1986): 73–74.
13. Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 2010), p. 399.
14. Joseph Wallace, "True Poetry and False Religion in Abraham Cowley's Davideis," RES 66 (2015): pp. 895, 898.
15. Christopher D'Addario, "Abraham Cowley and the Ends of Poetry," in Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and Its Aftermath, 1640–1690, ed. Lisa Jardine and Philip Major (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 121.
16. Tita Chico, "Minute Particulars: Microscopy and Eighteenth-Century Narrative," Mosaic 39, no. 2 (2006): p. 149.
17. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact (U. Chicago Press, 1998), p. 132.
18. Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London, 1665), v, iii.
19. Preston, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation (above, n. 11), p. 5.
20. Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London (London, 1667), 112–13.
21. Quoted in Brian Vickers, "'Words and Things'—or 'Words, Concepts, and Things'? Rhetorical and Linguistic Categories in the Renaissance," in Res et Verba in Der Renaissance, ed. Eckhard Kessler and Ian Maclean (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2002), p. 303.
22. Ibid.
23. Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets (Dublin, 1779–81), p. 39.
24. Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Sir John Hawkins, Vol. VIII (London, 1787), p. 311. I reference exceptions here—mainly in Cowley's defense of the Pindaric odes in his preface to Poems (1656)—to underscore that not all Cowley's poetry aligned with Royal Society objectives, nor was it meant to. Rather, poems of the sort I discuss in this essay demonstrated what verse could do for the practice of experimental science in the mode of the Royal Society.
25. Arthur Nethercot, "Concerning Cowley's Prose Style," PMLA 46, no. 3 (1931): p. 963.
26. Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2008), p. 39.
27. Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (New York: Cambridge U. Press, 1996), 364–65.
28. Roger Lund, "Wit, Judgment, and the Misprisions of Similitude," Journal of the History of Ideas 65, no. 1 (2004): p. 57.
29. Abraham Cowley, "Several Discourses by Way of Essays," in The Works of Abraham Cowley (London, 1668), p. 125.
30. Abraham Cowley, Poems (London, 1656), p. 9.
31. Nethercot, "Concerning Cowley's Prose Style" (above, n. 25), p. 962.
32. Abraham Cowley, The Works of Abraham Cowley, vol. 1, ed. J. Aikin (London, 1806), 63–65.
33. Thomas Sprat, The Works of Abraham Cowley (London, 1668), p. 2 (lines 5–8). All references to "Of Wit" are to this edition and are cited by line.
34. Chico, "Minute Particulars" (above, n. 16), p. 149.
35. Bacon, The New Organon (above, n. 7), p. 48.
36. Guibbory, "Imitation and Originality" (above, n. 5), p. 101.
37. Note also (lines 5–7) that Cowley genders philosophy male. To maintain clarity and consistency—and not to concur with Cowley's gendering of philosophy—I reproduce Cowley's language and refer to philosophy as "he" in this sentence.
38. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 238–39.
39. Here Cowley portrays a painting contest from Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, in which one of the competing artists, Zeuxis, produces a painting of grapes so realistic that it attracts a flock of hungry birds. Bacon himself uses this conceit in The Advancement of Learning (London, 1605), writing: "Wordes are but the Images of matter . . . to fall in love with them, is all one, as to fall in love with a Picture," p. 18. Cowley also uses this conceit—making direct reference to Zeuxis—in "Of Wit" (1639): "For men led by the Colour and the Shape / Like Zeuxes Birds fly to the painted Grape." As Guibbory notes in "Imitation and Originality," Cowley almost certainly borrowed this conceit from Bacon's Novum Organum (1620), p. 104.
40. Gore, "Francis Bacon and the Desserts of Poetry," (above, n. 4), p. 362.
41. Sprat, History (above, n. 20), p. 18.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 318–19.
44. Sprat, The Works of Abraham Cowley (above, n. 33), p. 3. All subsequent citations are to this first edition of Works and appear in parenthesis in the text of this essay. Sprat's account of the life of Cowley in this volume is unpaginated, so I have counted the pages from the first page of the "Account" and numbered them accordingly.
45. Ibid., p. 24 (line 5, line 1, line 6). All references to "To Sir William Davenant" are to this edition and are cited by line.
46. I use these gendered examples because they reflect Cowley's thinking about what veracity looks like in verse, though I want to make clear that I don't subscribe to or endorse such gendered views.
47. Sprat, History (above, n. 20), 214–15. Note also that Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra calls "chivalric epistemology" the association of advancements in science with advancements of political empire, both of which were undeniable aims of the Royal Society, in Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 2006), 7–13.
