The Chameleon or the Sponge?: Marvell, Milton, and the Politics of Literary History
Andrew Marvell’s critical stock has never been higher. Long admired for a handful of widely anthologized lyrics, more recent interest in his prose writings has revealed Marvell to be among the most penetrating observers of the debates over liberty and toleration that convulsed the seventeenth century. As a result of this attention Marvell himself has become—along with his friend John Milton—closely identified with the founding of modern liberalism. My concern in this essay however is to interrogate the ways in which Marvell’s politics have been read under the shadow of Milton; and indeed I discover a “Miltonizing” hermeneutic in common between the High-Church controversialists who repudiated Marvell’s tolerationist pamphlet The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672) and modern historians and critics who have sought to write Marvell into the history of English liberty. Without seeking to nullify Marvell’s significant contribution to that history, I argue here that the lyric poet of “inconclusiveness” is more continuous with the Restoration politician than we have thought; and moreover that by taking Marvell’s politics on his own terms we stand to gain valuable perspective on the unstable divisions and contingencies of seventeenth-century political experience.
Eros and Abuse: Imagining Andrew Marvell
Andrew Marvell's The unfortunate Lover narrates a gothic story of abuse, wounding, and incoherence for which the victim finds solace in the eternity of verse. Critics have lamented the poem's extravagance and seeming failure of control; it is, however, as tightly controlled in its argument as any of Marvell's more familiar verse, and its extravagance is scarcely unmotivated. The similarities between the gestures and images of The unfortunate Lover and insistent passages elsewhere in Marvell's texts, both verse and prose, suggest that the story of this self imagined in the poem had deep and enduring meaning for the poet. The poem's scenes of abuse and incoherence are in fact key to opening Marvell's entire story of the self and to new ways of understanding the situation of the topical and occasional in Marvell's lyric project.
Nietzsche's Moral Philosophy
Expounds and criticizes the moral consequences of Nietzsche's basic concept of the will to power. This study argues that Nietzsche's doctrines on moral subjects reveal a man profoundly torn between different and conflicting impulses.