The Critical Reprocessing of Andrew Marvell

Abstract

Marshall McLuhan points out in Understanding Media that the content of a new medium is a reprocessed old medium. For instance, when writing was new, Plato transformed the old oral dialogue into an art form' or more currently, the film has reprocessed plays and novels. The principle is an interesting one, but it needs refinement: no medium shows a more voracious appetite than Critical Commentary. Yet it is not a late arrival that devours selected predecessors; it is ancient and eats everything. Also, the collision of media, as one cannibalizes others that resist it, make them self-consciously critical themselves, so that criticism turns them into metathings, or their own first treatises. (It also threatens to devour itself, like the serpent its own tail, but that is another matter.) We have become more aware in all this upsurge of criticism that poems absorb a good many things, including earlier poems, ideas and images, topics, genres, and common language. The modernizing of Marvell has proceeded accordingly and has pondered not only how Marvell pulls things into his poetic universe but what sort of criticism his poems implicitly ask for and are. It is the recent work of the three-hundredth anniversary of his death that concerns us here. We should perhaps acknowledge at the outset that each phase of the critical appraisal of Marvell has produced substantial differences of opinion, the tercentenary commemoration included. When we read documents in the history of Marvell commentary chronologically, as Elizabeth Donno has conveniently arranged them,2 we find (as several people have recently pointed out) that earlier critics presented very partial versions of him. They ignored the lyric poet almost entirely and even the verse satirist and saw primarily the prose satirist and patriot whom Swift admired and emulated. Not until the earlier nineteenth century did the lyric Marvell emerge, and not really until Grierson and Eliot