Eros and Abuse: Imagining Andrew Marvell

Abstract

Andrew Marvell's The unfortunate Lover narrates a gothic story of abuse, wounding, and incoherence for which the victim finds solace in the eternity of verse. Critics have lamented the poem's extravagance and seeming failure of control; it is, however, as tightly controlled in its argument as any of Marvell's more familiar verse, and its extravagance is scarcely unmotivated. The similarities between the gestures and images of The unfortunate Lover and insistent passages elsewhere in Marvell's texts, both verse and prose, suggest that the story of this self imagined in the poem had deep and enduring meaning for the poet. The poem's scenes of abuse and incoherence are in fact key to opening Marvell's entire story of the self and to new ways of understanding the situation of the topical and occasional in Marvell's lyric project.

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