The Poems

It is hard to think of Nicholas Rowe being a poet at all without the influence of John Dryden. Dryden’s work suffuses Rowe’s own. While there may only be a few direct allusions to the poetry of Dryden – including his panegyrics, translations, songs, and the distinctive use of triplets ¹ – and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (London: Printed for [Samuel Simmons] and to be sold by Peter Parker, 1667; 2nd edn in twelve books, 1674), ² and indirectly to Abraham Cowley’s Interregnum pseudo-Pindaric ‘Odes’, Matthew Prior’s militaristic panegyrics, and Joseph Addison’s celebration of the Duke of Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim in The Campaign (London: J. Tonson, 1704), the influence of these poets can be felt afterwards everywhere. Going back further, the Cavalier Poets’ lyricism and the neo-classical traditions of an earlier age are reflected in Rowe’s poetry, particularly in his wide range of references to figures from ancient Greek and Roman mythology and history and in the aptness of his epigraphs from a number of classical texts. To write in this vein is to follow shrewdly on a well-trodden path. That this was detected in Rowe’s work by his contemporaries can be seen in Samuel Cobb’s contemporaneous final poem, An Epistle to Eudoxus (London: E. Currl and E. Sanger, 1712), a translation from Calvidius Letus [Claude Quillet], later misleadingly included by Edmund Curll in his edition of the Poetical Works of Nicholas Rowe (London: E. Curll, 1715). Cobb (1675–1713) worked with Rowe in the year of the publication of An Epistle on the translation of Quillet’s Latin Callipaedia (1655), and clearly fell under the influence of Dryden, too.