Marvell Studies Ten Years After the Longman Annotated English Poets Edition of Andrew Marvell's Poems

Abstract

This article is an account of how the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Andrew Marvell's poems that came about after I was asked to provide editorial samples in 1988, prior to being approved as editor in 1990. The edition appeared in hardback in the spring of 2003 and then in a revised paperback in 2007. I explain the principles behind the edition, the help I was generously given by other scholars, and how its construction evolved in the context of 17th century studies in the 1990s and early 2000s, before moving on to its reception. I point to the significance of Marvell archival discoveries since my edition appeared, and future major Marvell projects, including editions of his poetry, prose and letters, and the context of scholarly collaboration in which those projects have developed and will be completed. I try above all to give a sense of what opportunities an extensively annotated edition of a major poet gives to the reader, to teaching and to further scholarship, in addition to significantly enhancing the status of Marvell himself and his verse.

Eliot: Form and Allusion

“…Hardyeseque 'throbbings of noontide' subside into becalmed, subliminally troubled amazement via echoes of Marvell, 'The Garden' (in the use of 'amaze') and Daniel 7: 28, 'As for me Daniel,' the prophet confesses, 'my cogitations troubled me'. 16 Surprising both in the King James Version and in Eliot, the Latinate 'cogitations' assumes, in the poem, an air of self-mockery. It means less 'Reflection previous to action', Samuel Johnson's meaning quoted in the OED (2b), than, in context, 'indeterminate and possibly futile reflections on an entire poetic process', with its imperatives, hypothetical conditionals, and assertions.…”