Andrew Marvell: Loss and Aspiration, Home and Homeland in ‘Miscellaneous Poems’ by Cousins, A. D. (review)

A. D. Cousins’s monograph on Andrew Marvell’s Miscellaneous Poems (1681) makes a fresh and detailed contribution to our understanding of this enigmatic poet’s verse. In this book, Professor Cousins continues his longstanding interest in Marvell that has produced numerous articles and the co-edited collection (with Conal Condren), The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell (Scolar Press, 1990). Cousins does not address all the poems in Miscellaneous Poems, choosing instead to focus his six chapters on key clusters of poems that scholarship has emphasized as major works: the Mower poems; ‘Nymph Complaining’ and ‘To his Coy Mistress’; ‘Bermudas’ and ‘The Garden’; the religious verse (‘The Coronet’, the Dialogue poems, ‘Eyes and Tears’, ‘On a Drop of Dew’); the Royalist poems and ‘An Horatian Ode’; and ‘Upon Appleton House’. Various other poems are discussed, but these are the main foci.

The book is notable for a number of reasons. First, its thesis unifies around the themes of loss and aspiration, home and homeland. These prove to be fertile and interconnected terms that emphasize Marvell’s engagement with notions of ‘loss of a royalist political order and literary culture’, ‘loss of home … versions of homelessness’, and ‘loss of or separation from a homeland’ (p. 2).

Second, these versions of loss are presented as catalyst and matter for Marvell’s ‘authorial ambition’, which manifests itself via his extraordinary poetic virtuosity. This virtuosity is visible not just in the way Marvell signals his knowledge of literary and intellectual traditions, but in his appropriation and transformation of them in poems that possess inherent complexity and multivalency. Marvell’s ability to hybridize and set in productive opposition aspects of religious and profane literary traditions displays his connoisseurship and, relatedly, his aspiration to demonstrate artistic conquest of poetic rivals past and present.

Third, it is all very well to assert Marvell’s poetic sophistication, but quite another matter to demonstrate it adequately. Cousins succeeds in this because his knowledge of intellectual history and its literary forms from antiquity to the seventeenth century is impressive in scope and detail. He can demonstrate how Marvell’s ‘Nymph Complaining’ transforms Fanshawe’s translation of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido at the same time as it sets up an interplay between Ovid’s Heroides, the Niobe myth, and the tradition of the Marian hortus conclusus. The analysis of ‘An Horatian Ode’ offers an exciting exploration of the disparate influences of Lucan’s Caesar and Horace’s Octavian, but adds to this reference to Augustus’s Res gestae divi Augusti and association with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Marchamont Nedham. Cousins demonstrates the relevance of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Sannazaro, but also of Theocritus, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid (among others) to understanding Marvell’s Mower figures and enriches this further by illustrating how Reformed theological discourse complicates the renovation of classical pastoral. Each poem addressed enjoys this level of detailed exegesis that shows up competing and often unresolved discourses at play within and between poems at the same time as building a sense of Marvell’s persistent, artistic wrestling with forms of loss, aspiration, home, and homeland.

As early modern Literary Studies seeks its post-New Historicist future, we need examples of illuminating scholarly readings that are cognizant of historical contexts and yet able to do justice to the nuances and complexities of literary tropes and traditions evolving through time and across Latin, English, and other European vernaculars. It is no longer sufficient to declare vaguely that Marvell is a Puritan and/or Neoplatonic writer with a penchant for aesthetic precision, elegance, and scepticism. The publication of Nigel Smith’s copiously annotated edition of The Poems of Andrew Marvell (Longman, 2003; rev. 2007) gave scholars a compendium of literary contexts to work with in analysing Marvell’s poems. Cousins’s book is an exemplary complement to this archival plenitude because it delivers a convincing thesis by way of embedding the poems in a...