Introduction: The Social Character of Andrew Marvell's Imagination

Sean H. McDowell

In his landmark 1965 English edition of Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot, Pierre Legouis writes that in addition to jettisoning hun­ dreds of footnotes intended primarily for the "(largely theoretical) French general reader" of the two-volume, Andre Marvel poete, puritain, patriote, 1621-1678 (1928), he also cut copious biographical material, thereby omitting "many details of my text that contributed to the delin­ eation of Marvell, man and writer" (vii). At the time, the cuts made sense because the primary interests of the majority of Marvell scholars on both sides of the Atlantic centered almost exclusively on Marvell's lyrics. A Marvell scholar writing in 2009, however, cannot help but wish Legouis would have steered his censoring pen the other way. One of the primary concerns of Marvell scholarship at present is resolving the mys­ teries in the life of this enigmatically private writer who nonetheless ded­ icated his life--and most of his writing--to public service, first on behalf of the short-lived Commonwealth and then of his hometown, the port city of Hull, for which he served in Parliament for nineteen years. Today we want most the delineation of Marvell, writer and man. Between Legouis's revision and the publication of the present issue has come a sea change in our understanding of Marvell. It began in the late 1960s and 1970s, fostered in no small part by John M. Wallace's influential Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (1968), with the recognition that the Marvell well-known in British Parliamentary history is at least as important as Marvell the lyricist. The primary impetus for the change may be attributed to the pioneering work of Annabel Patterson, whose Marvell and the Civic Crown (1978) dis­ mantled the lyric/politics dichotomy and demonstrated what a more holistic reading of Marvell's life and writings would look like.! Since then, the connections, not the separations, between Marvell's parlia­ mentary career and his , between his public and private lives, and between his Commonwealth and Restoration friendships, loyalties, and beliefs have spurred the interests of Marvell scholars across the world. Subsequent articles and books have solidified further the holistic view. 2 Even a cursory flip through Nicholas von Maltzahn's An Andrew Marvell Chronology (2005 )--essential reading for the poet's biography--reveals EIRe 35.1 (Summer 2009): 3-10 4 how tightly Marvell's life was intertwined with the major events of his time, how deep his social immersion perpetually was, and how mislead­ ing the assumption that his professional life moved from an idealized retreat at Nunappleton to a full-time commitment to public action in bustling . Marvell's written work no longer can be categorized and then separated into discrete period boxes: As demonstrated by Nigel Smith's 2003 edition of the poems--the closest thing we have to a vario­ rum commentary--some of the poems we once confined to the early 1650s on the basis of their content--"The Garden," for instance3--more likely date from the Restoration, thereby subverting some hitherto unquestioned accounts of Marvell's poetic development. Finally, with the momentous publication of the two-volume Yale edition of The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell (2003), we have for the first time convenient means with which to study Marvell's substantial engagement in the pam­ phlet controversies of the early and mid-. This opportunity prom­ ises to deepen our overall conception of the development of Marvell's entire literary career, not just of the prose. Yet in spite of the new insights we have acquired in Marvell studies during the past thirty years, throughout academe the selective interest in Marvell the lyricist still persists, even among seventeenth-century litera­ ture specialists, who may teach a few Marvell chestnuts in their courses ("The Coronet," "," and "The Garden" the most likely candidates), but who may not have read the prose or fully come to terms with the often highly sophisticated ways in which Marvell man­ ages to stitch his lyrics to the pressing cultural, religious, and political concerns of his times. The essays in this volume, all by members of the Andrew Marvell Society, not only assume the holistic view of Marvell as a publicly engaged writer aware of the personal costs of such engagement but also offer new insights into Marvell's parliamentary reputation, his use of poetry in the furtherance of personal concerns, his poetic strate­ gies, his sexuality, his complex negotiations with key seventeenth-centu­ ry political figures, and his habits of conceptualization. Together, they underscore, as the title of this issue suggests, the crucial importance of the social character of Marvell's imagination in any reading of his works. The collection begins, appropriately enough, with a detective story by Annabel Patterson. Delivered as the Louis L Martz Lecture at the 2006 South-Central Renaissance Conference in San Antonio, Patterson's essay traces Marvell's surprising influence on the shaping of British parliamentary history, as that history was being written in the eighteenth century. Even though the Long Parliament of Charles II, like the preceding Elizabethan and Stuart parliaments, was a close-lipped body, apt to punish its own members for even taking notes, Marvell in his