Hope Against Hope: Abraham Cowley and the Metaphysics of Poetry

In a poem to his friend Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley offered a critique of hope in ostentatiously metaphysical terms. He thus initiated an exchange, "On Hope," whose philosophical tenor offers new insights on the dialectic between poetry and metaphysics in seventeenth-century England. F...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inELH Vol. 90; no. 4; pp. 979 - 1006
Main Author Tregear, Ted
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.12.2023
Subjects
Aristotle (384-322 BC)
British & Irish literature
Donne, John (1572-1631)
English literature
Eroticism
Frailty
Metaphysics
Ontology
Poetry
Poets
Spirituality
Theology
Violence
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Summary:In a poem to his friend Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley offered a critique of hope in ostentatiously metaphysical terms. He thus initiated an exchange, "On Hope," whose philosophical tenor offers new insights on the dialectic between poetry and metaphysics in seventeenth-century England. Following Cowley's lead, this essay explores the principle of hope in metaphysical poetry. It reads his poem against the metaphysical tradition, from Aristotle to Theodor Adorno, to clarify its engagement with the Aristotelian notion of potentiality. And it shows how, even in writing against hope, Cowley's poetry can think, and hope, in ways that metaphysics cannot.
ISSN:0013-8304
1080-6547
1080-6547
DOI:10.1353/elh.2023.a914013