Introduction to Andrew Marvell

-------- 12 -------Introduction to Andrew Marvell In the late 1950s Richard Wilbur wrote me to say eat he had agreed to begeneral editorfora series ofcheappaperbacks, "The Laurel Poetry Series," and would like me to do one of the Renaissance volumes. I didn't want to do Herbert ß thought The Temple should be read complete) so Isuggested Marvell. He agreed, and I was able to include all the lyrics and selections from the political poems and satires —for an original price of thirty-five cents! My essay was the introduction to the volume, where I tried to say some of the things I hadn't said in "Marvell's 'Nature' " and give a coherent account of "Upon Appleton House." It has never been reprinted. Readers today find Andrew Marvell one of the most enjoyable of seventeenth-centurypoets.John Donne's poems are dramatic,passionate , and witty; Ben Jonson's lyrics are elegant, euphonious, and precise. Marvell's poems are often all of these things. Of the many candidates for heir of both the earlier great figures, Marvell's claims seem to us the best; but the heir was not merely a pupil: Marvell's verse shows a sensuous aliveness unequaled by any of the earlier seventeenth-century poets except Thomas Carew, and an ability to evoke unexpected worlds of meaning surpassed only by Milton. Marvell has remained, however, one of the most mysterious and controversial of English literary figures. Most readers today know only a few of his poems ("To his Coy Mistress," "The Garden," "The Definition of Love," and perhaps "On a Drop of Dew" and "An Horadan Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland"), and they think of them as "metaphysical poems," belonging to the "school of Donne." Almost everyone seems to like the poems, but modern critics have shown little agreement about what the poems say Andrew Marvell157 and mean. For the single poem, "The Garden," differing interpreters have suggested the writings of Buddha, Plotinus, Hugh of St. Victor and St. Bonaventura, Saint-Amant and Théophile de Viau, and "Hermes Trismegistus" as essential "keys." The poem might stand alone as proof that intelligent readers can enjoy good poems while understanding them in radically differing fashions. Coleridge, Poe, and Emerson seem to have responded to some of the same things which modern readers find in the poems. For many nineteenth-century readers, however, "The Nymph complaining for the death of her'Fawn," "Bermudas," "On a Drop of Dew," and some sections of "Upon Appleton House" suggested that Marvell was a "nature poet," an interesting precursor of the Romantic movement. Some nineteenth-century readers, among them Wordsworth and Landor, still remembered the eighteenth-century image of Marvell, not as a poet, but as the political and religious controversialist of the Restoration. Marvell's prose is witty: even Charles II and Jonathan Swift were amused by The Rehearsal Transpros'd, and many of its pages still seem very funny today. But that work and Mr. Smirke: or The Divine in Mode suffer now from the fact that they were so insistently addressed to the immediate occasions of pamphleteering warfare. A Short Historical Essay Touching General Councils, Creeds, and Imposition in Religion is, however, tightly constructed and devastating in its effect; and An account ofthe Growth ofPopery, and Arbitrary Government in Englandis a forcefully presented if violently partisan history of English government from November, 1675, until July, 1677. Marvell's prose attacks on religious intolerance and "arbitrary government" made him a hero for the later Whigs. He was one of the few so-called "metaphysical poets" whose works were reprinted in the mid-eighteenth century. The poems we care most about today were not printed during Marvell's lifetime. Unlike Donne's they seem not to have circulated in manuscript. So far as literature is concerned, most of Marvell's contemporaries knew him only as an "excellent Latinist" (the modern reader may need to be reminded that Hortus and Ros seem to have been written before "The Garden" and "On a Drop of Dew") and as the "wit" who supported the "Good Old Cause": the legally unprovable author of most of the prose, and the reputed author of a number of libelous...