This only grant me, that my means may lie
Too low for envy, for contempt too high.
Some honour I would have
Not from great deeds, but good alone.
Th' unknown are better than ill known.
Rumour can ope the grave,
Acquaintance I would have, but when'it depends
Not on the number, but the choice of friends.


From `Of my Self'

Abraham Cowley (1618-67) was one of the most popular English poets of his time. `He must always,' said Dryden, `be thought a great poet.' His work was held in high esteem by Milton, Johnson (who wrote one of the greatest of his Lives about him), Pope and Wordsworth,

He has been unduly neglected in our century, and this selection, with critical introduction and annotations, is designed to re-introduce Cowley to modern readers as a writer of intrinsic rather than merely historical interest. His restoration to the available canon is timely: his poetry has lessons for the latter years of this century much as Donne's had for the poets of the early twentieth century.

Abraham Cowley: Selected Poems is the only affordable selection of his work currently in print, and usefully complements the multi-volume library edition being produced by the University of Delaware Press.

DAVID HOPKINS is Reader in English Poetry at the University of Bristol. He is the author of John Dryden (1986) and editor of the forthcoming Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets (1994). 
TOM MASON is lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, and author (with David Hopkins) of The Story of Poetry (1993).