Marvell and the Abrupt Style

Time and again in Marvell’s writing we meet with a check in his voice, even when he is at his most fluent. This was a self-conscious stylistic choice. Marvell’s poems, his letters, his prose works, his parliamentary speeches, his paper-work: all at one time or another speak to their own abruptness. He was highly attuned to this point of literary and social decorum. There had long been a reaction at home and abroad to Renaissance Ciceronianism and its excesses, where Seneca (with Tacitus and others) came in the late 16th century to offer a welcome corrective, with lasting consequences as humanists reconceived their roles in the emerging early modern state. Abruptness was the most mannered consequence of Seneca’s insistence on the five-fold virtues of brevity, clarity, simplicity, elegance, and decorum. But it also raised what may be termed the Senecan question: how abrupt should one be in writing, and to whom or on what occasions?