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This chapter begins with the fortunes of the Stanley circle in the aftermath of regicide by exploring their involvement in a volume of elegies for Henry, Lord Hastings, which is also an indirect lament for the death of the king. Hall and Marvell both contribute elegies, even though Hall was by now a paid propagandist for the Commonwealth government. The rest of the chapter addresses the ‘Horatian Ode’ and relates it to the new patronage environment of post-regicide England. Former royalists were persuaded by John Hall to continue their literary activities under the new government, and the ‘Ode’ is seen as a meditation by Marvell on the choices open to the poet in this brave new world. The echoes of the poem embedded in early Restoration writing by Dryden and Cowley show that the poem circulated and was read as a bid for Cromwellian patronage.

This chapter is concerned with intertextual aspects of civil war literature and with the way such intertexts complicate and intensify the aesthetic response to the suffering and loss associated with civil discord, examining a disparate group of songs and poems that share a universalizing strategy for representing contemporary civil wars: works reflecting civil war in seventeenth‐century England, nineteenth‐century America, and twentieth‐century Spain. Authors considered include John Denham, Bob Dylan, Abraham Cowley, Andrew Marvell, Herman Melville, William Cullen Bryant, Richard Henry Stoddard, Robert Lowell, Federico García Lorca, Geoffrey Parsons, and Miklós Radnóti. This strategy is particularly salutary given the need for a literary response to reach readers on (or sympathetic to) both sides; otherwise it risks being propaganda.

The poems presented here by Abraham Cowley, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and George Wither are all state-of-the-nation poems that invoke the presence of national angels. Milton and Wither raise questions about the relationship between the islands and the kingdom. Cowley's Cromwell, driven by an evil angel, retorts to Marvell's ‘Angelic Cromwell’. Marvell may have known Wither's poem, and also Wither's later poem on Cromwell's riding accident, which construes a complex and qualified mode of praise. All of these writings are rooted in an account of the nature and offices of angels that was common in early modern Britain. And all engage in a dialogue that is founded upon a sense of the imaginative possibilities of angels.

This chapter shows what happened to the analogy between England and Israel after the Restoration. Cowley and others greeted Charles II as David and invoked the idea of Israel's redemption. The Church of England was reconstructed, symbol of unity in English Israel. But the reestablished Church was an instrument of division in the nation, persecuting nonconformists like Bunyan and the Quakers, who insisted that the persecuted people of God were the true Israel. Milton and Dryden represent alternative attitudes toward a nation claiming to be Israel. Suggestive of the complex English attitudes toward Jews, Milton as Hebraic prophet demonized nation–building, detaching Israel from the English nation and from Jewish Israel in his Restoration poems. Dryden, England's poet laureate, appropriated Isaiah's prophecies for England and used the biblical Absalom's rebellion to reaffirm Charles II's Davidic authority and the Israelite status of the nation. Some of the material on Milton here appeared in an earlier form in ‘England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton's prose, 1649–1660,’ in Milton and the Jews, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 13-34; and ‘“The Jewish Question” and “the Woman Question” in Samson Agonistes: Gender, Religion, and Nation,’ in Milton and Gender, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 184-203, both reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.

The evidence of 18th-century women's literary history shows many different ways of responding to Aphra Behn. This chapter has divided consideration of Behn's effect on her female successors into three sections. The first deals with the 1690s, when the recently deceased Astrea is an inescapable point of reference. In the second, the chapter focuses on the relations between Behn and a number of individual writers in the first half of the 18th century, arguing that for Susanna Centlivre and Delarivier Manley, Behn was most significant as a role-model for professional writing, while Jane Barker is influenced in a more complex and troubled way by Behn's work. The third section considers women writers' use of Behn in the later 18th century. Historical distance and an established female writing role allowed for a new detachment in the attitudes of women writers to her, but Hannah Cowley's adaptation from Behn showed that she could still be a significant influence.

QENS on diffusing atoms with a sizable coherent neutron scattering cross section yields information on interference effects and correlated motion contained in the coherent scattering function S(Q, ω). As an introduction to this complex situation, this chapter begins by describing first coherent elastic scattering due to short-range order. The structure factor S_SROM(Q) for short-range order of a lattice fluid can be expressed in terms of Cowley's short-range order parameters. For a diffusing lattice fluid, coherent QENS consists of a single Lorentzian: its intensity is given by S_SRO and its width Λ and thus the collective diffusion coefficient D_c exhibit the so-called de Gennes narrowing: at the Q value where S_SRO has a maximum, Λ and D_c exhibit a minimum. Furthermore, elastic distortion scattering (Huang scattering) and quasielastic scattering on distortions combined with diffusion is dealt with.

The assertion of immortality on the title-page of Hesperides, Effugient avidos Carmina nostra Rogos--a misquotation from Ovid's elegy for Tibullus--is no mere invocation of a literary commonplace. Rather, it points to a nexus of intertextual relations involving poems on death, afterlife, and poetic companionship in Tibullus, Propertius, the Amores and Ovid's exile poetry, which is persistently important to Herrick. Ovid's elegy makes poetic imitation itself integral to its consideration of literary immortality, figuring poetry as an ongoing conversation between poets living and dead. In Herrick's numerous evocations of this group of interrelated poems we see him entering the conversation with his classical predecessors, and extending it to his near contemporaries through beautifully integrated allusions to Dante, Shakespeare, Denham, Cowley, Carew, and above all Jonson.

For Johnson, the discovery of ‘faults’ was essential to the business of criticism. His treatment of even — perhaps especially — the writers he most admires is notable for the space he gives to their faults, alongside the beauties which might elsewhere be observed. This chapter probes the oscillation and critical principles which lie behind Johnson's appreciation and deprecation. As the chapter argues, the two can exist in illuminating symbiosis. Ultimately, we must look beyond Johnson's concern with ‘correctness’, to his belief that good criticism involves undeceiving the reader.

Chapter 3 examines the influence of Virgilian prophecy on Abraham Cowley’s poetry, especially his attempts to praise the Stuart monarchy. Cowley’s predictions of a royalist victory in his first epic, The Civil War, were soon overtaken by events in the war itself, and forced prophecy to give way to lament. His next epic, the Davideis, deployed prophecy more successfully to acknowledge the future that he hoped would come to pass but feared would not. Cowley’s translation from the Georgics continued to express hopes for a Stuart restoration while acknowledging that such an event might never happen, even though it was first published in the early 1660s. Cowley’s final epic Sex Libri Plantarum celebrated the Restoration in explicitly panegyrical terms, but the Virgilian allusions in the poem’s prophecies undermined its triumphalism and predicted further catastrophes for the Stuart dynasty and the nation.

This introduces the book's central questions of how reading affects authorship and how both are gendered in the seventeenth century. The mid-seventeenth century saw fertile tensions between scholastic, humanist, and modern views of reading, writing, and originality. This chapter explores the literary theories of contemporary writers including William Davenant, Abraham Cowley, and Thomas Hobbes in order to create a backdrop for women poets’ own conceptions of reading and influence. It also draws on recent histories of reading, to show that despite individual studies of women's libraries, patterns of reading and influence have not yet been theorised in relation to women writers. It is argued that ideas of cultural capital can be complicated and developed in relation to women's writing and attention to poetic form can be richly revealing of women's intellectual culture.

This chapter focuses on Katherine Philips to explore teasing paradoxes: the poetry of retirement is written in intense engagement with literary culture; the poetry of solitude demands dialogue. Katherine Philips and her contemporary Abraham Cowley are now fairly widely accepted as influences on Andrew Marvell and especially his consummate and complex retreat poem, ‘The Garden’. This chapter argues that it might have been Philips who influenced Cowley rather than vice-versa, based on the dates of the published verse. The odes which Philips and Cowley write to each other demonstrate a barbed but productive poetic exchange which is a two-way dialogue, rather than the male poet straightforwardly influencing the female follower. Recent scholarship has foregrounded Philips as a poet of royalism and politically-motivated female friendship. This chapter suggests that Philips's retirement poems, which claim to be disinterested and apart from the fray, are actually at the centre of a complex relationship between Philips and Cowley, which is both flattering and contestatory. Both poets claim their free choice of retirement in poems which slight the other, developing the tendency of the Pindaric ode to express rivalry as well as praise.

This chapter shows how Lucy Hutchinson politicized the process of reading in her long biblical poem Order and Disorder. The poem and its marginal notes show her guiding her Restoration readers into an appropriate way of interpreting the Bible, and her poem. This chapter shows that Hutchinson used biblical references to create a radical subtext for the poem, threatening the restored monarchy with her presentation of kings whose rule is 'despised' by their subjects. It is argued that Hutchinson develops a poetics of not knowing, of willing uncertainty, in order to counter skeptical thought. This chapter will reveal connections with Guillaume Du Bartas's Divine Weekes, Abraham Cowley's Davideis, and Milton's Paradise Lost. Order and Disorder presents fascinating evidence of how seventeenth-century poets perceived the epic to be gendered, and the ways in which it became both a vehicle for political comment and a form with which to experiment.

This chapter examines how writers of Renaissance pastoral extensively used a gestural, rather than representational, strategy. It considers a range of English writers, including William Forrest, Thomas Lodge, John Beaumont, Giles Fletcher, John Dennys, Alexander Ross, William Drummond, Henry Vaughan, and Abraham Cowley. It also examines seventeenth-century English translations of Greek and Latin texts, Petrarch's eclogues and letters, and the works of other continental writers, such as Justus Lipsius. Like Ben Jonson's “To Penshurst,” these diverse texts not only operate without significantly employing mimesis, they also are very much concerned with facilitating for the reader the appearance of the countryside outside of the text. The chapter underscores the fact that Renaissance pastoral in England is largely a London phenomenon, as most artists contributing significantly to pastoral's development in the early modern period lived in or near London at some point. Whether named outright or simply referenced as the “City” or “Town,” London looms large in Renaissance England's pastoral art.

Burlesque drama—arguably the most widespread form of theatrical entertainment in nineteenth-century Britain—brought the Iliad and Aeneid to a wider range of spectators than those who traditionally encountered ancient literature and mythology at school. These entertainments both exploited contemporary performance culture and enacted the tensions between their composite ancient and modern sources. This chapter focuses on four successful examples of epic repackaged for the London stage, by renowned playwrights at leading theatres, who particularly revelled in negotiating the transformation of classical epic into popular drama: Thomas Dibdin’s Melodrama Mad! or, The Siege of Troy (1819, Surrey Theatre), Charles Selby’s Judgment of Paris; or, The Pas de Pippins (1856, Adelphi), Francis Cowley Burnand’s Dido (1860, St James’s), and his Paris, or Vive Lemprière! (1866, Strand). Analysis of these burlesques reveals deliberate anachronistic juxtapositions which turned the epic performances into complex games of identifying—or overlooking—their varied references.

The decade after the Restoration saw the publication of several important works and collections of verse. Samuel Butler’s mock-heroic Hudibras satirized the civil war conflict, and although Abraham Cowley’s reputation was at its height, he lamented in his Pindaric odes the lack of reward and recognition for his hardships in the service of the royal family in exile. Katherine Philips’s poems were printed without her consent, and she was preparing an authorized edition when she died from smallpox. John Milton published his epic poem Paradise Lost in 1667, divided in 1674 to form twelve books, followed by Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes in 1671.