Truth-Telling, Mass Media, and The Poet's Office

This essay argues that Andrew Marvell and John Ashbery are joined by a common understanding of the poet's office, shaped bytheirshared experience of media change. I explore the relationship between Ashbery's engagement with Marvell and his effort to stylize mass media's derangements of individualized experience. The argument is elaborated through several contexts: the communications revolution of England's civil war period, Marvell's political poetry and prose, the twentieth-century reception history of seventeenth-century poetry, with particular emphasis on the place of Rosemond Tuve in that history, and Ashbery's student papers. The essay asserts the continued relevance of the discourse of office to critical and cultural understanding.