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"Abraham Cowley was beloved by every muse he courted," states Henry Felton in his Dissertation on Reading the Classics (1713); Cowley excelled in every literary genre he undertook. In his early years, he was best known as a dramatist and satirist; in mid life he was most widely read for the love lyrics of The Mistresse (1647, 1656) and for the Pindaric odes; later readers have alternately preferred Cowley's Anacreontic verse and his essays. It is not for lack of talent that Cowley is accorded secondary status as a poet next to his contemporary John Milton, but because his epics-- The Civil War (1679) and Davideis--were not or could not be completed. Cowley's four books on the troubles of the first biblical kings, however, broke new ground for the epic, preparing the way for Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), and John Dryden considered Cowley the master and reformer of English poetry, according him the title "mentor."
Much of what is known about Cowley's life comes from the author's essay "Of My Self" and the "Life" by Thomas Sprat, prefixed to the Works of 1668 and subsequent editions.
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