Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 IX Milton and Poetry, 1603–1660 GARTH BOND, JAMES DOELMAN, GREGORY KNEIDEL AND MITCHELL M. HARRIS This chapter has four sections: 1. General; 2. Herbert; 3. Donne; 4. Milton. Section 1 is by Garth Bond; section 2 is by James Doelman; section 3 is by Gregory Kneidel; section 4 is by Mitchell M. Harris. 1. General This year saw the publication of two important and long-overdue biographies of major poets. Margaret P. Hannay’s Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth will be covered in next year’s volume of YWES; the other is Nigel Smith’s highly acclaimed Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, the first scholarly biography of Marvell since 1928. Smith takes full advantage of the significant textual and documentary work produced in the past decade, including his own edition of Marvell’s poetry, seeking to reintegrate the politician with the poet. As a subject of biography Marvell poses numerous difficulties. His lyrics are frequently difficult to date, and even attribution is problematic for the satirical poetry associated with him. Despite a largely public career, Marvell’s own views and values often remain frustratingly elusive. Smith faces these difficulties head on. He presents the evidence and offers interpretations where he deems them warranted, but is also willing to leave obscure matters unresolved, respecting the privacy so clearly valued by Marvell. Smith traces the literary and political connections Marvell made in grammar school at Hull and, more fully, as a scholarship student at Cambridge. The unexpected death of Marvell’s father precluded what Smith judges a likely career in the church and set the poet instead on a path of dependence and service. Marvell toured the Continent from 1642 to 1647, and Smith traces references in his poetry and prose to influences likely encountered on these travels. He also confronts the difficulty of Marvell’s early political commitments, leaving the reader to square the poet’s involvement with a group of royalist poets and his anti-republican satire of Tom May with the subtle and variously interpreted ‘An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’. Marvell was clearly moving towards Commonwealth patrons, however, serving as a tutor The Year’s Work in English Studies, Volume 91 (2012) ß The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] doi:10.1093/ywes/mas009 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 555 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 first for Sir Thomas Fairfax’s daughter and then for Cromwell’s ward, William Dutton. Smith dates ‘To His Coy Mistress’ to the break between employments and ‘Bermudas’ to Marvell’s time with Dutton; but ‘The Garden’ and ‘The Mower Against Gardens’ are separated from the other pastoral poetry associated with the Fairfax’s Nun Appleton Estate and redated to a 1668 lull in parliamentary service. In fact, the key shift in Smith’s biography (no doubt, too, in Marvell’s life) occurs in the move from private to public service, first as an assistant to Milton and in intelligence services in the final year of Cromwell’s Protectorate, and then in the House of Commons, representing Hull. Smith is at pains to emphasize the continuity of these positions, arguing against ‘the commonplace idea that Marvell decided to change career by becoming an MP’ (p. 154). For the reader, the key impact of this shift is the dramatic increase in documentary evidence of Marvell’s daily business, and the resulting emphasis on his political activities. Smith does not shy away from the inglorious, such as Marvell’s endless wrangling to secure for Hull Corporation rights to build a potentially lucrative lighthouse. But the details of parliamentary politics under Charles II also provide a necessary backdrop for understanding the Painter poems in which Marvell played a key if not fully determined role, and also for the satirical prose that would secure his greatest fame amongst his contempor- aries. Even when discussing Marvell as an MP, Smith demonstrates the difficulties of teasing out his private political convictions. The one point of certainty for Smith is Marvell’s unwavering commitment to religious tolerance, leading Marvell at times to support Charles II against the less tolerant parliament. In this light, Smith’s reading of ‘Scaevola Scoto- Brittannus’, a Latin poem portraying a Scottish dissenter, tortured and executed for an attempted assassination of a bishop, as a victim of religious persecution deserves attention (pp. 296–300). The bulk of the biography’s final third, however, rightly concentrates on Marvell’s prose, detailing both his satirical tactics and the arguments of the pamphlets to which he responds and those which responded, in turn, to him. Smith’s final chapter details the posthumous legal proceedings surrounding Marvell’s estate and his possible marriage. Smith offers no final judgement, though he is clearly more sympathetic to the possibility than some critics, albeit a marriage likely of convenience, designed to ensure that Marvell’s housekeeper could not be compelled to testify against him regarding his controversial but theoretically anonymous writings. Smith also considers the evidence for Marvell’s sexuality without committing to a determined view. In addition to his biography, Smith also contributed the book chapter, ‘ ‘‘Mirrored Doubles’’: Andrew Marvell, the Remaking of Poetry and the Poet’s Career’ (in Hardie and Moore, eds., Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception, pp. 226–40), in which he focuses more exclusively on Marvell’s literary career. This focus emphasizes Smith’s notion of Marvell as an imitative poet whose talent lay more in creatively mirroring others than in egoistically distinguishing his own voice, a view present in the biography but less directly argued for. Two of Marvell’s poems, ‘A Poem upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector’ and ‘Upon Appleton House’, received additional attention 556 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 in articles and book chapters. Anthony Mortimer, in ‘Domesticating the Devil: Cromwell and His Elegists’ (in Stirling and Dutheil de la Roche` re, eds., After Satan: Essays in Honour of Neil Forsyth, pp. 46–67), considers Marvell’s neglected elegy alongside three related elegies in order to explore the difficulties that Cromwell posed for his eulogizers. While Edmund Waller’s poem was handicapped by ‘his own record as a turncoat’ (p. 50), Thomas Sprat’s youth left him less attuned to the scars of the Civil War and thus more willing than the others to commemorate the whole of the Cromwell’s career. John Dryden’s poem is more circumspect than Sprat’s, but its similes often place Cromwell’s achievements in a questionable light. All three poems reveal the main difficulty, in Mortimer’s view: that Cromwell’s uncrowned status disrupts traditional monarchical panegyric. Marvell’s poem differs from the other elegies in its mixing genuine grief with its praise, and by taking a more than passing interest in Cromwell’s private virtues. Mortimer closes by noting the movement from Marvell’s majestic but ultimately dehumanized portrayal in the ‘Horatian Ode’ to the domestic intimacy of this final poem on Cromwell. William M. Russell, in ‘Love, Chaos, and Marvell’s Elegy for Cromwell’ (ELR 40:ii[2010] 272–97), traces the elegy’s use of chaos, an ambivalent but politically charged word in the period. He argues that, in this last poem on Cromwell, Marvell seeks to depoliticize the Protector by replacing a purely destructive chaos with a more mythologically rich image, capable of creation as well as destruction. Marvell does so by linking chaos and love in a cycle of dissolution and rebirth, the sort of dialectical concordia discors common in Marvell’s finest poetry. Though called to death by his love for his recently deceased daughter, Eliza, the resulting chaos prepares for the redemptive instalment of Cromwell’s son Richard as new Lord Protector. Still, Russell acknowledges that Marvell’s effort at depoliticizing Cromwell is only partially successful. Turning to ‘Upon Appleton House’, Lynn Staley, in ‘Enclosed Spaces’ (in Cummings and Simpson, eds., Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, pp. 113–33), places Marvell’s poem at the end of a tradition, reaching back to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, of using gardens or other enclosed parcels of land as a metaphor for exploring the boundaries of England and its relationship to the church. Much of her chapter examines this tradition through medieval Britain, covering Bede, Monmouth and the Brut, the Wilton Diptych, Langland, Chaucer, and Mum and Sothsegger, before turning briefly to John Gaunt’s encomium of England in Shakespeare’s Richard II. Though agnostic as to whether Marvell was familiar with this tradition, Staley does argue that he had access to the necessary libraries. She also points to more immediate precedents of pastoral politics: Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’, where the garden is both a sign of privilege and of the bonds of hierarchical ordering; and John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, where the use of landscape and river reinforces royalist themes. Staley argues that, for Marvell, the nunnery’s bounded and isolating Catholic past is reconstituted by the virginal Maria Fairfax and her rejuvenation of the estate’s natural beauty. In ‘ ‘‘[A]n inn to entertain / Its Lord a while, but not remain’’: Home and Dislocations in Andrew Marvell’s ‘‘Upon Appleton House’’ ’ (CS 22:iii[2010] 21–36), Vassiliki Markidou argues that a series of factors—the MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 557 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 property’s inheritance through a female line, the Catholic background of Fairfax’s forebears, the poem’s depiction of Fairfax’s daughter Mary as a ‘militant female’ (p.