“Andrew Marvell and the Epistemology of Carelessness”
ResearchPaper
EnglishDavid Carroll Simon
This essay considers the “wildly digressive voice” and “careless receptivity” (558) in Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House (1651).This “peculiar affect” Simon argues, “discloses an unfamiliar history of experimentalism leading from Bacon’s late humanist conjectures to the laboratories of Marvell’s contemporaries.” Specifically, it examines this voice through the context of the “trauma of civil war” and “Marvell’s interest in Optics” (558). Simon concludes that “Marvell’s visionary carelessness” leads us to “consider freedom from discipline another pathway to understanding” (580).Faculty63086English Literary History