ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Philip Hardie analyses Cowley’s ‘contamination’ of epic, didactic, and Pindaric lyric. Epigraphic quotations in Poems refer to Virgil’s ambitions of taking poetic flight, and the scholarly Cowley will have been aware of the generic crosscurrents that play over this section of the Georgics. A Lucretian-Virgilian-Lucanian model of cosmic epic, epic that locates human actions within a natural-philosophical framework, informs Cowley’s two unfinished epics, the Davideis and The Civil War. In the Pindarique Odes, Cowley develops Virgil’s hint of a flying chariot at length in ‘The Muse’. ‘To Mr. Hobs’ praises Hobbes’ ‘epic’ ventures – his philosophical imperialism and his voyage to new philosophical worlds – through a web of allusions to passages in Virgil’s Aeneid, Silius Italicus’ Punica, and Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae. Similar themes are aired in more playful vein in ‘Ode. Sitting and drinking in the Chair, made out of the Reliques of Sir Francis Drake’s Ship’. Cowley’s poetic expatiations in the heavens and to the ends of the earth are also, this chapter reveals, an expression of his aspirations to sublimity, a parallel with, and possibly an impetus to, the Miltonic sublime.
