ABSTRACT
Interpretation of Johnson's 'Life of Cowley' has tended correspondingly to focus on Johnson's theory of metaphysical poetry, his concept of poetical language and of 'wit'. In A. Cowley's poem on the death of Hervey, the particulars are symptomatic of a more pervasive ethical and aesthetic flaw, and Johnson discerns this weakness in the poem's exemplification of the faults of 'metaphysical' verse as a whole. He writes that Cowley 'knew how to distinguish and how to commend the qualities of his companion', but that 'when he wishes to make us weep he forgets to weep himself, and diverts his sorrow by imagining how his crown of bays, would crackle in the fire'. With Cowley, Johnson's subject was a minor poet of initial celebrity who at his death had exerted an enormous influence on his poetical successors and was a seminal presence in the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English poetry.
