How old does a writer have to be to count as precocious? Was the number the same in the Renaissance as today? What defines precocity? A few years ago, when I was trying to figure out the age structure of Renaissance authorship, I became interested in precocity. In part, this was because I thought I could actually track precocious writers down. There aren’t that many of them and, unlike a lot of Renaissance writers, they were almost certain to be alive when their works were published. But it was also because I’m intrigued by these figures. Since their literary careers start so early, you’re sometimes able to watch a whole life unfolding as you follow their publications. They age in writing.
Where to start? One poet came to mind immediately: Abraham Cowley. If you’re not a scholar of Renaissance literature, you probably don’t know who Cowley is. He’s one of those outrageously witty seventeenth century writers that no one really knows what to do with today. He doesn’t have the qualities that temper and counterbalance wit in many of the other metaphysicals. Unlike Donne, his wit isn’t a vessel for unfathomable passions; he never seems in any danger of losing his heart or his head. And unlike Marvell, another coolly intellectual poet, his verse isn’t lit up with flashes of strange beauty. It’s just ingenious, playful, and technically accomplished, which is a lot, if not always enough. Still, Cowley is an interesting figure. He has a place in literary history as the poet who helped to popularize the English ode, a form later perfected by Keats. He also has a place in intellectual history as a champion of the Royal Society in both verse and prose, an essayist, and a minor botanist, who apparently first described the coca leaf in print.
But today, he may be most famous for his precocity. His first book, Poetical Blossoms (1633), appeared when he was only 15, but many of the poems in it were written years earlier, including one when he was just ten. The book calls attention to this fact relentlessly. It’s emphasized in everything from the clumsy woodcut portrait of a distinctly beardless youth to the dedicatory verses. It’s also alluded to in the title: Cowley’s poems are blossoms, which is to say, they’re not yet fruit. He’s still unripe. As far as I can tell, no other English book—maybe no book in any language—made such a big deal of its author’s extreme precocity before the publication of Poetical Blossoms. There were, of course, prior volumes of verse that made apologies for a writer’s youth and inexperience—a form of modesty that was quickly becoming a boast. But Cowley set the bar for precocious authorship in English.
Why Cowley? Was he just that exceptional? Yes and no. Cowley really was very good for an adolescent writer. And even by the standards of the Renaissance, when writers published a bit earlier than in the twentieth century (more on that in a later post) he really was unusually young when his book appeared. But the actual story is far more interesting, because it’s not really about Cowley at all. It’s about precocity. Cowley was right person at the right time. He happened to be writing just as precocity was becoming an identifiable concept. The first use of the word in English was in 1606. It was by Barnabe Barnes, a minor writer who had made a moderately precocious debut at the age of 22 with an odd and occasionally disturbing sonnet sequence. By 1606, though, the slightly more mature Barnes was convinced that precocity was a problem. “The precocitie, which is in many of our young heads of this age” he complained, produced shallow young men who never matured into wisdom. In his eyes, it was a distinctively modern phenomenon.
The reason precocity came into focus around 1600 is simple: print publication. As I argued in an essay, “The Age of the Author,” by 1600, the increasing centrality of print to literature was beginning to have an impact on how and, more to the point, when authors were made. Samuel Johnson, discussing the precocity of Cowley, Pope, and Milton, understood that print was essential to the story. “Of the learned puerilities of Cowley there is no doubt,” he wrote, “since a volume of his poems was not only written, but printed, in his thirteenth [sic] year.” But print didn’t just certify or verify a preexisting precocity. It helped to create the concept. Prior to print publication, it was very hard to say when someone became a writer. Literary works often circulated among limited groups before making their way to a broader readership, and it wasn’t necessarily clear when the line separating mere writers from authors was crossed. Today, we don’t call every fifteen-year-old who writes a poem an author, but we wouldn’t hesitate to do so if a volume of his or her poems were published by a press. But before print, there was no equally easy distinction.
Sometimes, it’s true, manuscript publication could share many of the formal characteristics of print. In ancient Rome, workshops or scriptoria were serious businesses, producing many copies of new works simultaneously. I think it’s no coincidence that Ovid, the poet who’s closest to sharing the early modern ideal of precocity, came from this world. Still, print publication was different. It produced an object that the writer couldn’t make on his or her own, marking a much sharper distinction between routine writing and formal authorship. Once it became the expectation, as it was beginning to do in early modern England, it served as a source of authority that writers couldn’t achieve through manuscript.
Instead of a continuum between different forms of manuscript circulation, there was now a demarcation. In addition, unlike medieval or ancient scribal publications, printed books came with a year on the title page, making the exact point of publication a matter of record. Everyone could see who became an author when. Suddenly, authorship had an age structure. And precocity became a possibility that would haunt every writer afterwards.