"World enough": Miniature in Andrew Marvell's poetry.
Item
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Title
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"World enough": Miniature in Andrew Marvell's poetry.
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Identifier
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AAI9029944
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identifier
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9029944
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Creator
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Humphrey, Cheryl A.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Patrick Cullen
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Date
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1990
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English
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Abstract
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Andrew Marvell is fascinated with space, expanded to "unfathomable Grass," or compressed to its limits in a "pure and circling" droplet. He responds to space as a miniaturist, with what Gaston Bachelard has called an "admirable{dollar}\...{dollar}power to make space withdraw, to put space, all space, outside, in order that meditating being might be free to think." This essay traces his experiments with miniature to a seventeenth-century preoccupation with space, exploring his use of miniature in non-occasional poetry.;Chapter one surveys the seventeenth-century predilection for miniature as a form of spatial discovery in maps, gardens, Baroque art and meditative tradition. Chapter two examines Marvell's use of miniature as an invitational strategy, placing it within a larger context of Baroque "sacred play" in painting and poetry.;The remaining chapters focus on specific uses to which Marvell puts miniature in his poetry. He tends to explore three possibilities: a small world resisting its surrounds, subsuming them, or co-existing with them in mutual containment. The poet employs all three to extend possibilities of genre, regarding "kinds" as doorways to little worlds. He also, as chapter three develops, uses miniature to observe the pull between world and "other" in his dialogues, which demonstrate his conviction in reality's oppositional design. Chapter four examines a series of portraits--"Daphnis and Chloe," "The unfortunate Lover," "Mourning," "The Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun," "The Fair Singer," "The Match," "The Gallery," "Young Love," "The Picture of little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers," and the four Mower poems--cameos in which the mind in amorous distress resorts to enclosure, subsumption, correspondence, seeking shelter from love's havoc. Chapter five, which covers "To His Coy Mistress," "On a Drop of Dew," "The Coronet," "Bermudas," and "The Garden," explores a contrasting habit of mind, enclosure, subsumption and correspondence serving as entrances into complexity. Chapter six concludes the discussion with "Upon Appleton House," the poet reveling in the tricks of the miniaturist, toasting the mind "incamp'd," yet coaxing his readers into wonder at many-worldedness.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
