Green Conceits: Poetry and the Universal in Marvell and Cavendish

The status of the universal in literary studies has plummeted in recent years. Charged with absolutism on metaphysical, epistemological, and political grounds, it is summoned almost exclusively as an object of ideological unmasking. Valorized, by contrast, are the virtues of multiplicity and endlessness, which may by turns be generative and relentless, whether in the shape of the wandering dilations of romance, the abiding imminence of understanding in biblical epic, or the explosion of objects in empirical study. But for Aristotle and early modern writers, poetry and the universal were entangled; our critique of the one enfolds the other and has consequences for both. Set amid seventeenth-century efforts to grapple with infinity, this essay takes as its focus two poems, by Andrew Marvell and Margaret Cavendish, that test how we might conceive of nature as a whole and in principle, or as universal, in ways that account for, to varying degrees, the proliferation of particulars it entails. Being peculiar examples of metaphysical lyric, both turn poetic conceit against itself as a means of philosophical speculation. Both proceed in couplets, and in both nature ambivalently assumes the role of the beloved. And yet—by way of negation and affirmation, respectively—each poem affords an opposing attempt to resolve the dialectic of ends and endlessness, inviting our reappraisal of the possibilities of the universal, and of poetry.