Marvell in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

This chapter reviews Marvell’s presence in poetry in English from the early twentieth century down to the present. Beginning with T. S. Eliot’s decisive considerations of Marvell’s significance at the time of the tercentenary of Marvell’s birth, the chapter develops a picture of Marvellian themes which recur thereafter. Eliot’s reflections on Marvell were written as he was working on The Waste Land, and consideration is given to the qualified exploitation of a Marvell-derived ‘wit’ and ‘conceit’ in Eliot’s sequence. The chapter considers the availability of Marvell’s work to writers in this period, from Herbert Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems onwards, to capture the significance of these editions within the writing of such as W. B. Yeats. Having established these complex threads of connection back to Marvell, the chapter then follows them through the work of later poets from Britain, America, Ireland, and the Caribbean including Empson, Ashbery, Gunn, Lowell, Walcott, Hill, Dunn, and Donaghy.