cowleyism

Updated: June 6, 2025

As Cowleyism was a trick of seeing everything as it was not, and calling everything something else than it was, he would see things as they were or as, in his sullen disgust, they seemed to be and call them all by their right names with a resentful emphasis. He achieved the naked sincerity of a Hottentot nay, he even went beyond it in rejecting the feeble compromise of the breech-clout.

James Russell Lowell - The Function of the Poet and Other Essays