Greenwashing Marvell

Abstract

This article considers ecocriticism’s reception of Andrew Marvell and suggests ways forward for thinking about Marvell and ecology. It questions ecocriticism’s commitment to a progressive framework that fulfills early modern ecocriticism’s hope that pre-Romantic literatures can demonstrate proto-ecological ethics. Instead, I argue that Marvell’s poetry intuits emergent systems and their relationships. In essence, Marvell does not herald progress but rather bears witness to a universal decline. The rift at the heart of human experience in Marvell corresponds with the splitting and suspension of the subject across vast distances, this suspension being a consequence of the historically widening divide between the site of individual agency and the material consequences of that agency. Nonetheless, natural phenomena continue to interact with the poet, attesting to the agony of the internally displaced subject and offering, as tangible connections between the human and the land, some still-unknowable hope. As such, the poetry addresses historical developments that precede modern capitalism and the corresponding emergence of presentist ecocriticism.