Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell and the Nature of Events by Ryan Netzley (review)

Ryan Netzley manages to grasp, with forceful and impressive exegesis, the most deeply held contemporary Western ideological dogmas—those embedded in our understanding not of time per se, but of our very existence in time as historical creatures unmoored from any stable eternal order. In Nietzschean parlance, these dogmas can be articulated like so: an antiquarian attachment and reification of the past, on the one hand, and a philosophy of becoming, on the other, a "will to power" conceived in a way as an end to all willing, hoping, and desiring—that is, redemption necessarily tied to some future overcoming. Yet, of paramount importance to Netzley's study is the reiteration and understanding that both are a denial of the present, of immanence. In each temporal scenario, the present requires only sacrifice and penance—in short, historical struggle; what Netzley would have us question is the sanctity of any telos-oriented historical struggle, either past or future oriented.

The hundred years between 1588 and 1688 are a period rife with national turning points—the Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, the Civil Wars, the Restoration, the Great Fire, the Glorious Revolution—and may well inaugurate our modern bourgeois notion of significant historical happenings. Yet . . . it is only at the end of this period, with the not-so-bloodless revolution of 1688, that we witness something like our modern conception of revolution.

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Suppose we bracket off history at different turning points. Which historical lessons, at any given moment at any one of the multitude of present events, would we take away? Our modern conception of revolutionary change, that is, comes into focus once historians can weigh in on events after the fact (in this case, of the Glorious Revolution). Once this final event occurs, the retroactive moralizing (i.e., which forces were ultimately "good," which "evil") can be made with startling cavalierness and intellectual irresponsibility because for those who suffered each of these events, each upon the other in successive presents, no aiding and abetting exegesis existed to attest to either the justness or unjustness of historical acts unfolding. What, indeed, did such "historical" actors go on?

I believe Netzley's work is so novel and bracing that, as a matter of certainty, it will be ignored, or appreciated for the wrong reasons. Netzley's book should be read beyond or outside of disciplinary constraints of so-called "Renaissance Studies," though to make the claims he wants, Netzley positions himself around "a small portion of each poet's lyric work: for Milton, the composition of Lycidas in 1637 to the sonnets of the 1650s . . . for Marvell, the trilogy of Cromwell lyrics, as well as the early royalist encomia, and 'Upon Appleton House'" (2). Netzley aims to show how the "apocalyptic lyric . . . is the presentation of a future with being in the present, in opposition to the comforting evasions of deferral, mediation, and subjective impotence. It is in this sense that [lyric poetry] also unapologetically and unironically wants what it wants: a revealed end" (12).

Consider how effortlessly Netzley undercuts our most fundamental, ideological, humanistic assumptions. The nature of Netzley's criticism is so counter-intuitive to traditional literary critical pursuits as to require, perhaps, several reiterations. I will attempt several here.

First, discussing Marvell's elegy for Lord Francis Villiers, Netzley highlights this gruesome image: "Yet he died not revengeless: much he did / Ere he could suffer. A whole pyramid / Of vulgar bodies he erected high [. . .]" (qtd. in Netzley 49). Is Marvell here celebrating revenge, or Villiers's ability to enact his? What are we, the reader, to make of a "whole pyramid/ Of vulgar bodies [. . .] erected high"? As critics have noted, Marvell has possibly succumbed here to a revenge fantasy. Or rather, it becomes our lot as literary critics to explore the ways Marvell both succumbs to and, later in the poem, resists this temptation—in...