SOURCE: "Truth Is Truest Poetry: The Influence of the New Philosophy on Abraham Cowley," in ELH, Vol. 23, No. 1, March, 1956, pp. 194–203.

In the essay reprinted here, Hinman challenges the notion that Cowley turned his back on poetry when he embraced the "New Philosophy" of Roger Bacon and the empirical rationalism of Thomas Hobbes. While some religionists sought to suppress the spread of knowledge, Hinman remarks, Cowley believed that the poet could unite scientific understanding of natural phenomena and imaginative apprehension of the world to create a vision of universal order and harmony.

Because of his well-known enthusiasm for Bacon, Hobbes, and the Royal Society, Abraham Cowley has been accused of betraying his art to science, in complicity with men who refused to take poetry seriously or who were contemptuous of the imagination. He has been maligned as a passionless player with words, duped by the new science and rationalism...