Andrew Marvell's 'upon Appleton House'

Book excerpt: This edition provides both professional critics and casual readers with a methodical aid to appreciating what the author believes to be the most aesthetically eventful, unobtrusively playful, and undemanding complex long poem of the English Renaissance. Using line-by-line annotation, the edition strives to pay minute and continuous attention to the workings of the poem's dazzlingly protean wit, to its multiple, often breathtakingly artful, internal coherences. While the edition does all the usual work a scholarly annotation is expected to do, it is particularly focused on accomplishing what has not been done by previous Marvell scholarship: laying bare every instance of the poem's dynamic wit. In doing so, it, in particular, alerts Marvell's readers to such, for the most part, non-interpretive, aspects of the poem as associative connections operating on the periphery of one's conscious experience, palpable or merely hinted-at wordplay, coexisting multiple syntaxes, and patterns of formal and informal phonic coherence.