ABSTRACT
Renaissance humanism has much to offer for contemporary understandings of the relations between poetry, ethics, and politics. Humanist pedagogy was intensely concerned with ethical efficacy, offering elaborate frameworks for guiding practical decisions in the public life. In the belief that such decisions were bound up with particular linguistic choices, and that the classical world offered the fullest guidance for such choices, the humanist curriculum encouraged minute attention to language, from basic vocabulary to the minutest details of quantitative prosody. There was a truth in Andrew Marvell’s satiric comment that he studied Latin for poetic form before meaning: “this Scanning was a liberal Art that we learn’d at Grammar-School; and to Scan Verses as he does the Authors Prose, before we did, or were obliged to understand them.”1 I would like to explore the ethical implications of a neglected poem by Marvell, a late but remarkably full representative of the fruits of this pedagogy.
