ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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ANDREW MARVELL<br />
to Marvell’s own desire to win a post in the new government, a shift that has<br />
often been greeted with puzzlement and disappointment for either personal or<br />
literary reasons by readers who are generally more comfortable thinking of<br />
Marvell as the last great gasp of the English Renaissance rather than one of the<br />
first to anticipate—or participate in—the creation of a public verse shortly to<br />
be associated with Dryden. I do not think it is altogether surprising that Marvell<br />
himself should partake in this outward “turn,” however epochal such a shift in<br />
the dominant modes of poetic address has come to seem in retrospect. If the<br />
conjunction of the heroic and the worldly helps to distinguish the courtly<br />
Marvell from his Cavalier contemporaries, it is only a small step—adding an<br />
extra foot, in fact—for Marvell to make the heroic or the mock-heroic into the<br />
poem’s generating perspective.<br />
It is also the case, too, that the turn outward in these poems has less to do<br />
with Marvell’s response to an incipient rise of a new, dominant mode of poetry<br />
than with the desire simply to speak out on a number of different occasions and<br />
for different reasons. Although Marvell could certainly write heroic couplets<br />
with the pointed symmetries of later Neoclassicists—these features are especially<br />
apparent, for example, in the satiric descriptions of the monarchs and the<br />
encomia to Cromwell in “The First Anniversary”—he seems more preoccupied<br />
with defending a version of the heroic that he sees under threat at a particular<br />
moment in history than he does with defining enduring heroic traits in and of<br />
themselves. (The same motivation lies behind the commendatory poem to<br />
Lovelace.) In this context, it might be helpful to think of the poems as cultural<br />
“interventions”—as attempts to save something perceived in the poem as having<br />
potentially significant value to many, not just to a few. In Marvell’s case,<br />
moreover, the impulse has less to do with enunciating a set of continuous<br />
political beliefs than with ensuring a future for both the specific artifact—<br />
whether the state or a poem—and the individual architect or poet. Pragmatic,<br />
yes; idealistic, yes, but with a concentrated emphasis on distinguishing freedom<br />
from tyranny, acts of public significance from attempts at private gain, within a<br />
generally Protestant view of history and England’s place in that scheme.<br />
To underscore the problem of the heroic in these later poems is not to deny the<br />
poetry the deeply circumstanced political resonances that recent scholarship has<br />
been so good at detecting. Nor is it to question their rhetorical sophistication. But<br />
it is to suggest that part of their political and rhetorical strategy is to resist the<br />
tyranny of the local in favor of a more cosmopolitan or global perspective on the<br />
subject. In the case of “The First Anniversary,” for instance, sensitive though<br />
Marvell is to the issue of Cromwell’s official status as England’s Protector rather<br />
than England’s King, he invites us to consider these issues in light of a larger, more<br />
basic question. What would England be like without Cromwell at all? To think of<br />
the poem with this question in mind is to see, at once, its affinities with other<br />
“anniversary” poems; Donne’s come readily to mind as they perhaps did to Marvell<br />
since Donne’s poetry went through three editions in the brief time from 1649–<br />
1654. But it is also to mark out salient differences between the two, the most<br />
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