Andrew Marvell's mid -century aesthetics

This dissertation examines a series of aesthetic questions in relation to the seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell. Criticism of Marvell in the 1980s and 1990s tended to emphasize his politics, and I try here to shift the balance back to the poet's interest in form, especially in his most ambitious poem, Upon Appleton House. Marvell is one of the few poets who wrote major works both according to the norms of the Renaissance, during the years of the Civil Wars, and those of the Augustan Age, during the first two decades of the Restoration. The interplay of Renaissance lyric and Augustan satire is thus a recurrent concern of the dissertation.;After an opening consideration of the problems that can dog interarts comparisons, I look at Marvell's relationship to landscape gardening, raising the question of what sorts of seventeenth-century gardens Marvell had in mind when writing his lyric poetry of the 1650s. The following chapter deals with the aesthetic tastes of Sir Thomas Fairfax, the man who created the gardens Marvell knew at Nun Appleton. Fairfax's religion had a particularly strong bearing on the sort of poetry he wrote and appreciated, and I explore the shared literary sensibility of these two Yorkshiremen.;Much of what Marvell has to say about Fairfax pertains to his moderation, and the next chapter addresses the distinct influence of the Roman poet Horace, who showed how to praise the even-tempered, well-managed life. I consider both Horace's lyric and satiric poetry, arguing that this combination of modes served Marvell particularly well at the time he was writing in the middle seventeenth century.;The last chapter begins with a consideration of the mixed poetic styles Marvell saw in his fellow poet John Milton and then goes on to address how readers in different historical periods have heard the lyric vs. satiric elements of Marvell's writing.