ABSTRACT
Cromwell’s revolutionary propagandists typically associate him with the biblical and classical heroes who guided their people across turbulent waters into promised lands. In Milton’s Sonnet 16, he is the new Aeneas; in Marvell’s “First Anniversary” he is the new Noah; and in innumerable other works, he is the new Moses leading the chosen people to the New Jerusalem. It seems only logical, then, that Royalist poets like Abraham Cowley would reverse the analogy by depicting Cromwell not as the renewer but as the stifler of creative “streams,” one who resigns conquered poets like himself to laying down the pen as well as the sword.1 From this perspective, it seems equally unsurprising that immediately before the Restoration Milton uses similar tropes to frame the specter of the returning Charles: as a “captain back for Egypt,” he will “drown” England’s hopes by reversing its crossing of the Red Sea. And yet, according to Milton’s widow, the great anti-Royalist pamphleteer regarded Cowley as his favorite English poet next to Shakespeare and Spenser. This extraordinarily high evaluation raises a number of obvious questions: if it was based on purely formal considerations, why would a poet with such a highly tuned musical ear consider Cowley technically superior both to John Donne and to Andrew Marvell, whom he must have known in both printed and manuscript form? And if it were based on ideological considerations, why not prefer a fellow revolutionary poet like Marvell?
