The Emergence of Literary Biography

Literary biography—biographies of writers—emerged in the seventeenth century out of a tradition of historical biography and hagiography. Izaak Walton’s Life of John Donne (1640) and Life of George Herbert (1670) represent a bridge between idealized lives of saints and heroes and this new genre. Walton is innovatory in writing about the lives of poets, but he presents his subjects as exemplary men of God rather than as writers. Thomas Sprat’s Life of Cowley (1668) has long been seen as the first proper literary biography as it focuses on Cowley as a poet. Although a preface to The Works of Mr Abraham Cowley rather than a stand‐alone narrative, it is lengthy and incisive, generally considered as setting a standard unmatched until Johnson’s Life of Savage (1744). It is equally important as an early articulation of biographical methodology. Sprat’s insistence that we should seek to know no more about a writer than what that writer has chosen to reveal about himself in his published works would be the central plank of Wordsworth’s impassioned argument about intrusive literary biography over a century later in 1816. Sprat’s argument that Cowley has “given the World the best Image of his own mind in these immortal Monuments of his Wit” is usually taken as a simple ethical principle. But his insistence on biographical propriety in fact conceals his efforts to disguise awkward details of Cowley’s career as a spy and his unsuccessful political maneuvering during the Restoration (Darcy 2013, 26–39). But the issue of the extent to which biography should probe a writer’s private life remains a critical one today as does the often‐concealed politics of life writing. Cowley’s assumption that a poet is male will be echoed in biographical and critical writing throughout the eighteenth century, especially when copyright legislation gives commercial impetus to new anthologies of poetry, so crucial to canon formation.