>> DINA: Hello St Andrews, this is Dina Nayeri again and I'm here with Matt Augustine from the school of English who teaches 17th century literature and we're here because I would like to know a little bit about the poet Andrew Marvell and um, you know, some of the recent work that Matt's been doing so…
Matt, thank you for being here.
>> MATT: Thanks for inviting me to your study, yeah.
>> DINA: It's amazing to be in person, isn't it?
>> MATT: It's really nice not to be on Teams.
>> DINA Yes, exactly, so can you tell me about who Andrew Marvel is and also just, I guess, for an audience of people who love poetry but don't necessarily know so much about him, you know?
Give us a little bit of context.
>> MATT: Yeah, of course.
Uh, I I think most people will, will know Marvell as the author of a handful of really brilliant lyric poems - probably from you know an old copy of the Norton Anthology.
Um, you know, his most famous poem is To His Coy Mistress, 'Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime.'
Um but he had a longer and more varied career than I think many people know - he was the secretary in the Cromwellian protectorate, he was an MP for his hometown of Hull for the last 20 years of his life, he was occasionally a diplomat, he may have been a spy at a certain point in the restoration.
After the restoration he wrote these really, really, brilliant satires um that were defending religious toleration and making fun of making fun of bishops basically um and I think he's becoming better known as a prose writer.
>> DINA: Yeah, so, I want to hear more about the satire.
>> MATT: What do you want to hear about?
>> DINA: Well like, for example, like give me an example, what did he say?
Who was he talking to?
>> MATT: So uh Marvell starts writing prose pamphlets in the early 1670s uh at this moment when religious toleration is a really important issue and he's responding in the first instance to someone called Samuel Parker.
Samuel Parker is is the Archbishop of Canterbury's, uh, kind of henchman and chief propagandist and so he writes all of these pamphlets against toleration about you know are arguing for the persecution um of religious dissenters.
>> DINA: Parker does?
>> MATT: Parker does.
Um and Marvell is responding to Parker and refuting his arguments for persecuting religious dissenters.
But the way that he does so, because Parker doesn't sign all of his works - he publishes some of them anonymously.
Marvell is responding to him, and he says well, because I don't know who wrote these pamphlets but in in order to refute their author, I need to refer to them, I need to refer to the author in some way and he sort of plucks this character the satirical character off the restoration stage called Mr Bayes.
>> DINA: Yeah.
>> MATT: And Mr Bayes is kind of like the Mr Bean of the restoration or is this kind of self-important doofus.
>> DINA: Yeah.
>> MATT: And so he refers to Samuel Parker as Mr Bayes throughout like uh you know it's a work in two parts so it's like 400 pages of serious um religious and political argument about toleration but at the same time like making all of these jokes in reference to to Mr Bayes, Mr Bean.
>> DINA: That's brilliant because if we were reading it now and didn't know that we would read it as just a serious response but knowing that you understand that he's poking fun of him at every turn.
>> MATT: It's in a long a long history of satire that's, I think, marrying kind of the the high and and the low uh and that it's a tradition that flows through Jonathan Swift.
Swift is a great admirer of Marvell's prose and but when I think of it in terms of something like like Saturday Night Live - it's, you know, there it's a prose pamphlet, it's not a skit or a play um but the way that we read it, and the way that you might try to try, you know, as the way a scholar of the future might try to read or watch Saturday Night Live skits you have to understand a lot about what was going on in the contemporary culture to understand why their jokes are funny, um and why the bits work and so uh the pamphlets are really wonderful and brilliant but it takes a lot of effort to kind of get um get your arms around.
>> DINA: Well, I mean, it feels totally worth it, it feels like…I feel inspired to go and check it out, especially because I'm interested in that part of history but I didn't know any of this.
So, can you tell me a little bit about the book of essays that you've just done with Giulio and Stephen?
>> MATT: Yeah, of course, uh so the the occasion for the book of essays was Marvell's recent 400th birthday.
Marvell was born in March 1621 so it was uh his 400th anniversary of his birth in March of 2021 and so we organised a conference for this occasion - My St Andrews colleague, Giulio Pertile and I did, and then we brought in Steve Zwicker as part of the editorial team.
Steve's worked in Marvell for a long time - he was my teacher many years ago and we've since collaborated on a number of projects.
So we organised this this volume of essays and in part responding to the anniversary, but also responding to the surge of work on Marvell over the last 20 years since we got important new additions both of Marvell's poetry and of Marvell's prose um, you know, so we're, kind of, uh it's celebratory but it's also a reappraisal of the poet and the writer um, you know, on the occasion of his 400th birthday but also about 20 years removed from these major additions which have really reshaped the way that we understand Marvell.
>> DINA: Oh that's brilliant, that sounds fantastic.
Can you just, I guess, closing this for those of us who are not familiar with Marvell, can you tell us where we might start?
What is your favourite line from something that we might be familiar with?
>> MATT: Uh well, I think the place, the natural place, to go is to that great couplet from uh from The Garden, you know, “Annihilating all that's made, To a green thought in a green shade”.
A couplet that's so suggested, that seems to open kind of whole worlds even though no one's ever quite been able to parse just what it's, what it's, saying and isn't that in a way, I think, emblematic are some of Marvell's poetry which tends to work on relatively small textual scales, right?
He doesn't write these vast cosmological epics like Milton, he writes, um you know the these uh short lyric poems but which nevertheless seem to open up a kind of vast space within them uh for the reader and for the critic which, I think, is part of his enduring appeal certainly his appeal to critics because they're so spacious uh in that way.
>> DINA: Thank you so much for that, Matt.
That was fantastic.
I feel like I learned a lot.
Um, so before we go can you say the name of the book again and the authors just so if people want to look it up, look you up?
>> MATT: Yeah, of course, the book is called Imagining Andrew Marvell the poet at 400.
It was edited by myself, Giulio Pertile and Steve Zwicker and it's out from OUP.
>> DINA: Wonderful, thank you!
>> MATT: Thanks.