Andrew Marvell’s “A Dialogue, between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure”: Asceticism and the Plain Style

Abstract

This article examines the use of the plain style in Andrew Marvell’s poem “A Dialogue, Between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure.” It argues that, uniquely among other early modern body and soul dialogue poems, Marvell painstakingly differentiates the verbosity of Pleasure and the verbal restraint of Soul. Through this differentiation, the poem establishes a connection between the plain and the ascetic; the forbidding and austere Soul speaks plainly. The essay situates this conjoining of plainness and asceticism among other early modern authors who also associate, or simply equate, what is plain and what is ascetic. Based upon the poem’s capacity to epitomize a broader tendency within literary and religious culture, the article interrogates the narrative of asceticism’s demise or diminution in early modernity. The stylistic internalization of austerity becomes a means for the preservation—indeed, the flourishing—of post-Reformation asceticism.