A Marvell. Really. I spent a several years of my life on this book, and of course his delightful prose satires mostly of clerics, such as his Rehearsal Transpros'd, and I have never regretted a minute of it. The book I wrote on him, This Critical Age: Deliberate Departures from Literary Conventions
in Seventeenth Century English Poetry, was published by the U MN doctorate mill. It's in one German library, at the University where Pope Benedict XVI once taught and administered. I cannot claim he ordered it, but...
My book was advised by the delightful Leonard Unger, who with his friend Saul Bellow once composed, over lunch, a translation of the first four lines of Eliot's Wasteland--into Yiddish. Leonard had an expansive mind, and broadened my studies of Marvell into comparative European literature-- since Marvell was a language tutor to Lord General Fairfax's daughter. This was at Appleton House, after Fairfax retired as head of Cromwell's army at age 33, because of his refusal to participate in the trial of Charles I; when Fairfax's name was read in Westminster Hall, a voice called out, "He has too much sense to be here." This caused a mini-riot; it was his wife's voice, Anne Vere's. The following day, someone tried the same thing, and was branded.
Marvell had a marvelous ear, so that even in his funny prose satirizing the bishops (whom, like Milton, he generally opposed) he writes with amusing alliteration, on Archbishop Parker's sexual peccadilloes, "The sympathy of silk brought tippet to petticoat, and petticoat to tippet."
My study emphasizes that all of Marvell's poems are criticism of other poems, in verse. Many of them critique the pastoral convention then so prevalent, like "Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers," and "The Garden." His most famous poem, "To his Coy Mistress," unprecedented and unreiterated in his canon, critiques Carpe Diem poems, including many sonnets. (Shakespeare's "My Mistress' Eyes" also critiques sonnet conventions, as do a a few of Sidney's sonnets.) In fact, English poets until Dryden usually included criticism of other poems--Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, Carew, Suckling, Cleveland. After Dryden, criticism became a prose landscape. Too bad. With this loss, poetry became famously non-analytical. But why? Many Renaissance poems discourse on natural philosophy, what we call "science." Cowley in English, Giordano Bruno in Latin.
Ah! I said the magic word. Bruno's the subject of my latest book, The Worlds of Giordano Bruno (Birmingham, UK: Cortex Design, 2011). My other
referee for post-doctoral study, besides Leonard, was Archibald MacLeish, whose kind reaction to my early Bruno studies I wrote on my backcover,
"Your effort is better than academic." It has endeared me to my Italianist academic colleagues. ( )