The Prospect of History: Marvell’s Landscapes in Contemporary Criticism

Abstract

It sometimes seems hard to place Marvell criticism within oft-elaborated narratives of the critics’ progress through the last three decades. With a few exceptions, major assessments of Marvell’s work have shared a consistent methodological approach over the last thirty or so years, despite the claim that these decades have elsewhere witnessed the ruination and re-making of the citadels of literary criticism. The new critical Marvell notably defended by Cleanth Brooks failed for the most part to issue in a more obviously theory-led interrogation of even the more celebrated works, instead ceding its place to the historically oriented mode exemplified by John Wallace’s Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).² And Wallace’s is the methodology with which the mainstream of Marvell criticism has remained broadly in tune, practising a mode of reading both defined against formalism and not fundamentally altered by its encounters with the self-proclaimed innovations of the new historicism during the last fifteen years.³ Which is not to say that such criticism can be characterized as a cobwebbed corner of the senior common room unvisited by the concerns of a new mainstream.

And thus we never reach the dregs of the cup, Though we drink it up and drink it up and drink it up, And thus we dally and dip our spoon.

(Louis MacNeice,‘Poussiri’)

Le paysage est acte de liberté; il est une poésie calligraphiée sur la feuille blanche de climax.

(Jean-Robert Pitte, Histoire du Paysage Français)¹