John Ashbery named Marvell as one of the three poets to whom he was most attracted when he decided on his vocation in college, and Marvellian echoes resound throughout his work. This chapter argues that Marvell and Ashbery’s kinship is grounded in a shared experience of historical rupture introduced by new media, and in their efforts to welcome its derangements of individual experience. Both poets were alert to the possibilities mass media offered for the realization of traditionally Christian (though hardly exclusively Christian) virtues, and they made stylistic choices with these possibilities in mind. A just appreciation of their common strategies gives us reason to question the identification of aesthetic innovation with conceptual breakthrough, and to reconsider the role of ‘tradition’ in accounts of the English Revolution and the literature associated with it.
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