Placing poets: Cowley’s ‘Dust’, Thomas Sprat and the making of Poets’ Corner, 1667–1713

The name of the seventeenth-century poet, Abraham Cowley (1618-67), has long fallen into obscurity. Yet following his death an innovative and costly monument was erected in Westminster Abbey that positioned him as Chaucer’s equal, with an inscription proclaiming Cowley as “the Pindar, Horace and Virgil of England, and the delight, ornament and favourite of his age.” This article explores John Bushnell’s monument for Cowley, located in the Abbey’s South Transept, arguing for its particular importance within histories of the development of Poets’ Corner. By analysing this monument alongside print and paper monuments raised to Cowley in the wake of his death, I recover the intended purpose of Bushnell’s monument and redate it to 1667-8, making it the sculptor’s earliest known work made upon his return to England from the Continent around 1667. This analysis also reveals the particular involvement of the Duke of Buckingham’s chaplain, Thomas Sprat (1635-1713), within wider commemorative acts for Cowley. For Sprat became Dean of Westminster in 1683, assuming control over permission for burials and inscriptions. In post for some three decades, Sprat took an active role in demarcating a national pantheon of literary worthies that took Cowley as its literal touchstone. To understand Sprat’s role and ambitions necessitates working across the hierarchical categories of value that tend to separate out analysis of stone monuments from that of other commemorative objects, and to connect activity in the Abbey’s East Cloister with that of the South Transept, paying particular attention to the monuments, burials and graves of Aphra Behn (d.1689), Thomas Shadwell (d.1692), Charles St. Evremond (d.1703), Thomas Brown (d.1704), John Philips (d.1709) and John Dryden (d.1700).