SOURCE: "Cowley and the Current Status of Metaphysical Poetry," in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 13, 1963, pp. 323-40.

Here, Rawlinson takes issue with twentieth-century commentators who appraise Cowley merely as the last of the metaphysicals and a superficial poet who wrote according to the fashionable dictates of his time. Rawlinson cites the "Elegy on the Death of Mr. William Hervey," the "Ode on the Death of Mr. Crashaw," and the Essays in Prose and Verse as noteworthy examples of Cowley's distinctive and unique contributions to seventeenth-century English literature.

Why is modern criticism so unsympathetic towards Cowley? Compared with the amount that has been written on some other metaphysical poets in this age of mass production, there hasn't been a great deal of work on him—the more important things are a straight-forward biography by A. H. Nethercott, the recent Metaphysical to Augustan by Geoffrey Walton, and a few, but not...