Hold or Break: Andrew Marvell, Poetry, and Necessity

Andrew Marvell’s public poetry was part of the analytical poetry of governmental elites, often involving diplomacy and international relations, when truth was spoken to power in the context of advice delivered behind closed doors. Yet in Marvell’s lifetime that closed space of elite politics was opening up into a public sphere of opinions, one in which Marvell participated in Scotland as well as in England and parts of Europe. This chapter explores the powers of this forgotten verse, lyric and longer, situating Marvell’s achievement in its midst: poetry crossing from the study, the closet, the cabinet, and the court into civic, ecclesial and military public spaces, and where English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh places were decidedly less developed than places in Italy, the Netherlands, and France. It is this poetry’s capacity to break down and remake the world that gives us the most concise and readily graspable way of affirming that world’s value to us; it contains the first calculus of why we need what is beyond us, compassing political and the ecological thought. In our time of breaking apart, we need it.