ABSTRACT
Marvell begins his poem ‘On Paradise Lost’ by professing his fear, when first confronted with the epic, that Milton ‘would ruine … / The sacred Truths’. 1 This anxiety about a past authority under threat – whether Marvell’s own concern or just one he projects on behalf of his readership – contrasts markedly with Milton’s sense that it is the sacred Truth, not truths, that we still work towards communally. At issue is a difference in how communities are to be made, how cultural memory is to operate. For Marvell, memory supplies some charter from the past, whether for groups or for nations. On this basis, he situates the political protection he seeks for religious freedom in a historical recollection of what is normal in his own nation’s culture. Here his politics and his poetics converge, in an orientation to the past and the particular. Marvell’s stance recalls the relativist position of Gracchus in Donne’s Satire III, who ‘thinks that so / As women do in diverse countries go / In divers habits, yet are still one kind, / So doth, so is Religion’ (ll. 65–8) – the exception that will prove the rule is his distrust of Roman Catholicism in his Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677/8). The histories of nations and confessions matter; Geneva is not Canterbury. I shall propose that this accommodatory stance contributed to his lasting reputation as ‘the ingenious Mr. Andrew Marvell’.
