Marvell’s Poetry in Motion

Marvell held on to his poetic manuscripts more tightly than even the most print-shy of early modern poets. We would not know most of them now but for the seeming happenstance of their being printed in 1681, as Mary Marvell puts it in her prefixed certificate, ‘according to the exact Copies of my late dear Husband, under his own Hand-Writing, being found since his Death among his other Papers’. This chapter considers anew the transmission of Marvell’s poetry, asking what can be inferred about those ‘exact Copies’ (which did not survive the printing process) from two artefacts in particular. The first is Miscellaneous Poems (1681) itself. The other is MS Eng. Poet. d. 49, an annotated and supplemented copy of Miscellaneous Poems better known today as the ‘Popple’ manuscript. What do they tell us about what lay behind them? Are any traces of Marvell’s autograph verse visible notwithstanding printing house interventions? And to what extent does d. 49 replicate the Marvellian archive from which it was being prepared? In the absence of Marvell’s literary autographs, scholars have no alternative but to undertake such conjectural reconstructions.