Andrew Marvell's Liminal Lyrics: The Space Between

Faust (Southeastern Louisiana Univ.) draws on the anthropological concept of the liminal to analyze 13 of Andrew Marvell’s lyric poems. She concludes that appreciation of these poems’ liminal nature enables readers to cease seeking definitive understandings of Marvell’s life and works and to “revel in Marvell’s own appreciation of the process, the potential, the doorway, the space between.” The “liminality” she perceives in the poems includes a wide variety of “in-between places.” For example, “Upon Appleton House” reflects Lord Fairfax’s own liminal state; “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn” reflects the liminal state between life and art; dialogue itself is liminal in “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body”; and in “The Definition of Love” it is the reader rather than the speaker who is “left in the liminal area of uncertainty.” In short, “liminality” is a net cast widely, broadly describing Marvell’s well-known complexity and ambiguity. The book includes 20 illustrations and endnotes after each chapter. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Professor Faust’s goal is clearly to open a productive “space,” as her title suggests, for discussing Marvell’s strange, powerful poetics. At this she succeeds, and in this regard Magritte’s thoughts on representation really are provocative. Indeed, I might add that they are a welcome provocation to those of us who rest a little too easy in the confidence that our own historical approach gives us the correct perspective on Marvell and his culture, only to discover occasionally that we share a viewpoint with the observer of Magritte’s La Conditionne humaine. In that painting, as Faust notes, the “real” landscape turns out to be the combined product of artistic representation and our own imaginations. In such a space, backward and forward, Marvell seems fully at home.