Marvell and the Poetics of Civil War

• In Event: Marvell II: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics in Marvell

Abstract

Forty year ago, Christopher Ricks demonstrated the characteristic figure of speech in Marvell to be the self-inwoven simile. The self-inwoven simile, writes Ricks, “is a figure which both reconciles and opposes, in that it describes something both as itself and as something external to it, which it could not possibly be.” Ricks shows it to be a prominent feature also of the work of Marvell’s contemporaries, including Richard Lovelace and Thomas Stanley, and concludes that it is “a language for civil war (desolatingly two and one).” This paper will seek to place the self-inwoven simile in a tradition of poetry about civil war stretching back at least to Lucan but also evident in earlier English writers, including Shakespeare. The larger argument is that the criticism of Marvell is best served by approaches which combine the formal or the psychological with the historical, rather than oppose them.

Author

• Nicholas McDowell, University of Exeter