Poet on Poet: Neil Powell on Andrew Marvell

Neil Powell

Today's post is taken from Poets on Poets, edited by Nick Rennison and Michael Schmidt, (Carcanet, Waterstones, 1997). In this fascinating book, nearly a hundred of the finest modern poets make a personal choice of the work of poets of the past, and describe briefly the reasons for their choices. Chapters include John Ashbery on Thomas Beddoes, Christopher Logue on John Dryden, and Edwin Morgan on Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Poets on Poets is available from our website now (£8.96, free UK postage).

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about Proof of Identity

In today's archival blogpost, Neil Powell looks at a selection of poems by the metaphysical poet, Andrew Marvell, finding an admirable reticence over details of the poet's own life.

Neil Powell's seventh collection, Proof of Identity (£7.96, free postage), is published this month by Carcanet, and is part of February's Memory and Imagination promotion, offering 20% off selected titles which explore and re-imagine the past.

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Neil Powell on Andrew Marvell

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Poets on Poets.

Of all the momentous choices which confronted me as a schoolboy in the 1960s - ale or lager, boys or girls, Beatles or Stones - none was more vexatious than that between metaphysicality and romanticism; or, as an English teacher brilliantly put it, between cerebration and celebration.

It ideally needn't be made; and the poets I most admire are those who balance intellect and emotion in ways which transcend the necessary imbalances of their historical moments: Greville, Marvell, Coleridge, Auden, Gunn.

These five poets, and Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) especially, possess another, more mysterious quality: they combine a tone of close-up intimacy and candour with an extraordinary degree of personal self-effacement. We may happen to know various things about them, and information about their families or lovers or friends may turn up in their poems, but their neither bore us with their own egos nor send us scurrying to footnotes and biographies to complete their poems.

'The Definition of Love', unspecific and ungendered (apart from Fate), transforms lived-in authenticity into universality; 'To His Coy Mistress' is as intimate and, in its wonderful closing paragraphs, as urgent a carpe diem as any, yet it's of absolutely no importance who the coy mistress may have been or whether she existed at all...

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And what do you think? Metaphysicality or romanticism? How much personal information is necessary to make - or ruin - a good poem? Share your thoughts in the comments below.