Andrew Marvell
First collection published 1681 (by
"widow" housekeeper)
- poems are "playful miniatures"--graceful, humours surface
- witty, casual tone--light metrical feel?--exact diction,
rhymes ring
- Marvell was assistant to Jon Milton, Latin Secretary to
the Commonwealth 1657
- few poems published in his lifetime; known for his satires
- died of overdose of opiates--malpractice
- irony, not the paralyzing kind, is essential to his poems
(Summers)
- wrote "An Horation Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland"
- was "vouchsafed the wit, the poise, and the generosity of
imagination to inventory and summarize, memorably, in amber
language, each of its modes."
Doug Bush
- finest flower of secular and serious
metaphysical poetry
- blends "classical and metaphysical, continental and English,
epicurean and Puritan, civilized and simple" mingle without
fusion (except in his style)
- hard and dry (not damp--romantic)
- nature's cruelty
- aware he is " a man in the world of men"
- uses conceits but "remote from Donne is theme and feeling
and music"
- "Definition of Love": "poem is made up of philosophic
and verbal paradoxes, or realistic, cosmic, and geometrical
images. On the other hand, its thoroughly metaphysical thought
and feeling are welded with a classical clarity, rightness,
and inevitability of evolution"
- "To His Coy Mistress" (paragraph 1) hyperbole becomes
rational--emotion interpenetrated with levity" (p. 2) change
of tone: serious theme of time and death developed with"soaring
directness" (p. 3) "wit takes over to weave its antitheses
of macabre irony"
Joan Bennet
- exact contemporary of Vaughan
- "On a Drop of Dew" : structure: soul like dew rises up;
resolves on comparison of soul with "heaven-sent" dew (or
manna): resolution depends on accepting first analogy. "Applies
the dew drop to the Xian soul as, in geometry, one triangle
can be 'applied' to another and found by a process of reasoning
to be exactly congruent with it"
- Soul as Artist of Body: "Dialog between the Soul and Body":
uneasy partner, body has last word and "the fullest statement
of that predicament of the body. the soul's capacity to
hope, to fear, to love, to hate, to know, to remember, are
the causes of sin....What the soul does is to transform
man's nature and Marvell suggests a parallel with the artificer
who transforms nature into art, for instance the gardener's
topiary art"
- Appleton House: Fairfax refused to fight Scotland; a general.
Garden a topiary arranged in the shape of "forts with 5
bastions" Marvell's poem discusses this in stanza 41 to
45. Garden opposed to war: Marvell's politics important
but uncertain.
- emphasizes Marvell less austere than Donne--courtliness
(T.C. in a prospect of Flowers) and use of color, esp. green
and gold
Joseph Summers on Marvel
-
Close to centers of power--observed
them clearly
-
Always able to imitate Donne; quoted
his whole life, but never, except in verse satires, does
he approach JD's harshness of sound; Jonsonian elegance
of tone
-
Eclectic: use of many influences.
Coronet owes a lot to GH's "A Wreath." "On a Drop of Dew"
very close to Vaughan's "A waterfall"
-
Wrote early versions of best English
poems in Latin
-
a poetic "magpie"
-
Range of forms: meditations, complaints,
persuasions, praises, satires, description of landscapes,
definition, epitaph, heroic ode, dialogues or debates,
a framed monologue, songs with or without frames (Bermudas),
and "Upon Appleton House" which is disguised as Penshurst-like
complimentary poem--framed by guided tour) but includes
all major themes--even touches of masque and heroic.(?)
-
Ethical assoc. w. love, religion,
or politics, or a weird combination of two of those.
-
Popular poems mark a transition
from one to another.
-
Romantics (Lamb, Emerson, Poe)
loved Marvell first
-
in Donne tradition of amateur coterie
poet: though self-conscious and experimental aestheticism,
didn't seem to intend to publish his poems--last of this
kind (Even Dickinson submitted a couple)
-
1660 is a break: before those he
wrote the "good" poems; afterwards, the public poems
-
(Eliot calls this a "dissociation
of sensibility"--Summers Defends these poems
-
Jonsonian strain cultivated by
those who might become suspicious of "roughness, strength,
passionate and individual" qualities--esp. after
20 years of political chaos. Jonson = discipline; "measured
and balanced tone appropriate to rational and compromising
public judgments"
-
Marvell rejects the impassioned
speaker and irregular meter. Generally "metaphysical"
poets were either Anglo or Roman Catholic; Marvell hostile
to both. Generally they were partisans of Charles; Marvell
served Cromwell, though we know he did well also in Restoration.
-
We suspect late poems because rhetorical,
and therefore without "ironic embracement of contradictory
impulses"--but he saw himself after 1659 as primarily
a public person. Ironic admissions would be weakness,
not honesty.
-
Public poems most interesting if
we read them as destroying popular assumptions in order
to plant his own.
-
Integrity: never praised Charles
I nor denigrated him. Never slandered Cromwell after the
restoration. Ode to Cromwell was just and balanced.
-
Good prefatory poem on PL as bird
in flight:
-
and above humane flight
dost soar aloft,/ With plume so strong, so equal,
and so soft./ The bird named from that Paradise
you sing/ So never flags, but always keeps on
wing.
-
Same bird as in The Garden?
Soul in flight.--Miltonic image.
-
Defends Milton's blank verse to
Drydenian detractors (Dryden his bete noir):
-
-Well mightst thou scorn
thy readers to allure/ With tinkling rhyme..../
I too transported by the mode offend,/ And
while I meant to praise thee, must commend [can't imitate
blank]/ Thy verse created like thy theme sublime/
In Number, Weight, and Measure, needs not rhyme.
-
Recognizes that Milton's blank
verse and high style, divorced from greatness, could be
windy or bombastic.
-
Subjected private taste to rational
examination, "moves towards a balanced and witty poetry
of public judgement."
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