Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Woolf and Andrew Marvell
ouring Andrew Marvell. Augustine Birrell and others gave various addresses; and these,
along with critical pieces contributed by, for example, T. S. Eliot and Edmund Gosse,
appeared in 1922, edited by William Bagguley the city librarian, under the title Andrew
Marvell 1621-1678: Tercentenary Tributes. In his introduction to this 1922 volume, Bagguley
briefl y cited a toast proposed by James Downs to Hull’s distinguished visitors, which
had confi rmed that:
Andrew Marvell’s high position in English letters stands more fi rmly established
today in the minds of English-speaking people than possibly at any time during
the 250 years that have elapsed since he died, and to Mr. [Augustine] Birrell’s
great [1905] study of Marvell may be traced the increasing estimation of his
writings. (Bagguley 18-19)
Birrell’s “great study” was part literary biography and part verse anthology; and it belonged
to the “English Men of Letters” series, to which Woolf’s father had himself contributed
fi ve volumes. In this study, Birrell traces the process whereby Marvell had risen to his present
height. Critically, this had begun with Lamb’s Essays of Elia and a selection by Hazlitt
(Birrell 61, 230). Th ere were also verse anthologies, such as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury
and Th omas Humphry Ward’s Th e English Poets (230). Th ere were editions of the poetry:
Th omson’s of 1776; Grosart’s of 1872; and Aitken’s of 1892, reprinted in 1905 (Birrell
229, 7-8, 47). Th e thirty-sixth volume of Th e Dictionary of National Biography (which
had Woolf’s father as a founding editor) contained an entry on Marvell, as Birrell appreciatively
acknowledged (210). Owing to this build-up of critical and editorial attention,
Birrell concluded, “Marvell’s fame as a true poet has of recent years become widespread,
and is now…well established” (230).
Hence in his Tercentenary Address at Hull in March 1921, Birrell did not need to
exaggerate when referring to those verses by Marvell “that we all know and love,” and which
had “endeared him to our memories” (Bagguley 57). In his own 1905 study, he had himself
given a generous sampling of verse—extracts from “Upon Appleton House” (Birrell 36-45,
227-28); much of “Th e Garden” (45-46, 228); and all of “To his Coy Mistress” (46-47).
In the 2 April 1921 issue of the New Statesman, Desmond MacCarthy could assume his
readership’s familiarity with Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress,” which received his praise in an
“Aff able Hawk” column opposite Woolf’s own review of a Congreve play (757). Eliot, in his
essay “Andrew Marvell” of March 1921 for the Times Literary Supplement, which Bagguley
reprinted in Tercentenary Tributes the following year, endorsed the general sentiment that
“Marvell has stood high for some years” (Eliot 161). Signs of Marvell’s high standing would
continue to accumulate throughout the 1920s. H. J. C. Grierson included some of Marvell’s
poems in his 1921 anthology Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, which
Eliot reviewed that same year (Eliot, Selected Prose 59-67). H. M. Margoliouth’s two-volume
edition of the poems and letters was anticipated, in Bagguley’s introduction to the Tercentenary
Tributes, as “a new and complete edition of Marvell’s Works” (Bagguley 3-4). It eventually
appeared in 1927, and the Woolfs owned a copy.
Why then do we fi nd Woolf telling her diary for 29 April 1921: “I mean to read
Marvell” (D2 114)? It was not as though she hadn’t read Marvell before. Two years prior
to her diary entry, we fi nd another one, for 7 October 1919, recording her already “old
31