Abraham Cowley offers his nearest equivalent to an ars poetica in one of the notes to Pindarique Odes:

Here Cowley seems to echo Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie(1595), which explains how

Stressing “above […] possibility,” Cowley also counters Hobbes's Answer […] to Sir Will. D’Avenant's Preface before “Gondibert” (1651), which “dissenting onely from those that thinke the Beauty of a Poeme consisteth in the exorbitancy of the fiction” issues this ruling: “Beyond the actuall workes of nature a Poet may now go; but beyond the conceaved possibility of nature never.” Cowley's views about poetry nonetheless fluctuated so extremely that he judged “exorbitancy” sometimes essential to it and at other times fatal.

His biblical epic Davideis, which he abandoned after completing four of its projected 12 books, strays from its source material in the Old Testament to depict a Baconian academy in the shape of “A College […] where at greatProphets feet /The Prophets Sons with silent dili’gence meet, /By Samuel built, and mod’erately endow’ed.” Cowley justifies the plausibility of such a passage with one of his many notes: “The Description of the Prophets Colledge at Naioth, looks at first sight, as if I had taken the pattern of it from ours at the Universities; but the truth is, ours (as many other Christian customs) were formed after the example of the Jews.” He also explains how “Sons of the Prophets” might warrant such labeling “in the sense that the Greeks term Physitians […] Sons of the Physitians.”