ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
reputation as a poet rests: that is, the posthumously published Miscellaneous
Poems of 1681. 2
But if Marvell almost did not “happen” as a poet, it is entirely appropriate
that he did so in a volume with “miscellaneous” in its title: appropriate because
the phrase conjures up the older sense of “miscellany” as a literary category
referring to different “kinds” of composition (rather than mere odds and ends—
one thinks immediately of the difference with Herrick); and appropriate, too,
because for Marvell modesty and “miscellany,” in this more restrictive sense,
were hardly incompatible ideas. A man “of very few words,” as Aubrey described
him, and “in his conversation very modest,” 3 Marvell was not likely to be any
less selective, any less careful, when it came to writing, especially writing verse.
As Wallace Stevens remarked, “it is not every day that the world arranges itself
in a poem,” 4 and for Marvell, a member of Parliament from Hull for the last
eighteen years of his life, there were many fewer days for poetry than there were
for Stevens.
But he also made almost every one count. As some of his best readers have
noted, by which I mean readers most at home with much of the seventeenth
century, the Miscellaneous Poems somehow manages to include at least one
example—often the quintessential example—from nearly each of the major
literary “kinds” popular in the period: amatory verse reminiscent of both Donne
and Jonson at their most distinctive (“A Definition of Love” and “To his Coy
Mistress”); the longest “country house” poem yet written in English—too
“elusive,” writes Donald Hall when he was “young and lazy” because too long,
but “now its length is a luxury”; 5 a few epitaphs in Latin and English; several
verse epistles, including individual poems to the most famous Cavalier of the
period (Lovelace) as well as to its most notorious Puritan (Milton); pastoral
verse, fewer in number but more various than those in England’s Helicon; some
songs, perhaps used in masques or for other social occasions; a gospel hymn sung
by religious exiles that would have pleased Crashaw in its respect for artifice and
Wither for its purity of song; a meditative devotional lyric (“The Coronet”) that
reflects an intricate understanding of the problem of praise as set forth in
Herbert’s “Jordan [II]” and “The Wreath”; some satires that nearly span the
century in their use of models (from Donne to Cleveland to Dryden); a number
of poems inspired by current interest in emblem literature and the visual arts
(“On a Drop of Dew” and “The Gallery” are probably the most familiar examples
of each); and, of course, the “Horatian Ode,” Marvell’s most celebrated
reworking of a traditional subject in English and perhaps the greatest political
poem written in the seventeenth century.
With a lesser poet, so much attention to generic variety might become merely
a Cromwellian march through the available modes of the day. It can also place
unusual demands on any literary history since a chapter on Marvell can easily
become a recapitulation of the major modes and historical events of the time.
But a few simple points about Marvell are worth bearing in mind at the outset.
The first is that Marvell is probably the most resourceful practitioner of the
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