The Review of English Studies Prize Essay * Marvell and the Strategic Imagination: Fortification in Upon Appleton House

Abstract

While recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the political and topical thrust of Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House, his use of the language of military theory, reaching its apex in his playful description of Nun Appleton’s fortress-shaped garden, has received less attention. Yet both Marvell’s politics and his poetic technique are intertwined with his attitude toward military theory, a discourse in which the representation of landscape is necessarily political. This article reveals how Marvell drew on the distinctive political and social meanings that had accrued to one portion of the technical military discourse of his day, the science of fortification and siegecraft, in order to reinterpret the consequences of the English Civil War. For Marvell, the militarization of England, while causing its fall into postlapsarian history, simultaneously made a new imperial era possible.