Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events

New York: Fordham University Press, 2015 — 288 p. — ISBN-10: 0823263479; ISBN-13: 978-0823263479.What’s new about the apocalypse? Revelation does not allow us to look back after the end and enumerate pivotal turning points. It happens in an immediate encounter with the transformatively new. John Milton’s and Andrew Marvell’s lyrics attempt to render the experience of such an apocalyptic change in the present. In this respect they take seriously the Reformation’s insistence that eschatology is a historical phenomenon. Yet these poets are also reacting to the Regicide, and, as a result, their works explore very modern questions about the nature of events, what it means for a significant historical occasion to happen. Lyric Apocalypse argues that Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics challenge any retrospective understanding of events, including one built on a theory of revolution. Instead, these poems show that there is no “after” to the apocalypse, that if we are going to talk about change, we should do so in the present, when there is still time to do something about it. For both of these poets, lyric becomes a way to imagine an apocalyptic event that would be both hopeful and new.Introduction: Lyric Apocalypses, Transformative Time, and the Possibility of EndingsApocalyptic Means: Allegiance, Force, and Events in Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies
Hope in the Present: Paratactic Apocalypses and Contemplative Events in Milton’s Sonnets
What Happens in Lycidas? Apocalypse, Possibility, and Events in Milton’s Pastoral Elegy
How Poems End: Apocalypse, Symbol, and the Event of Ending in “Upon Appleton House”Conclusion. Revelation: Learning Freedom and the End of Crisis