Abstract: This article explores how Andrew Marvell figures the relationship between genre and creativity in his poetry, countering a critical tendency to read Upon Appleton House as subverting the country house poem. I position the poem alongside other examples of its genre from Aemelia Lanyer, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, and Thomas Carew to illuminate how Marvell figures the aesthetic and ideological restraints of the country house poem as imaginative sources of productive pleasure, eroticizing the relationship between poem and genre and finding new forms of creation in the process. Attending to this relationship reveals how Marvell imagines literary production outside of procreation, the dominant figure of production in his period and genre. He does this by transforming the procreative demand and the submission of the author’s imagination to the patron’s world order into an experience of autoerotic masochism that briefly enables new productive forms. He thus upholds his genre’s mandate for fertility while also imagining a kind of literary creation through erotic desire that is not entirely beholden to the dominant sexual politics. Although these new productive forms fade by the end of Upon Appleton House , this article concludes by turning to two of Marvell’s Restoration satires, The Last Instructions to the Painter and “The Loyal Scot,” to show how the poet held on to the potential of this new way of thinking about literary creativity.
Henry Carges (Thu,) studied this question.