Marvell’s Latin Poetry and the Art of Punning

Abstract

This chapter analyses the linguistic ingenuity of Marvell’s Latin poetry, in which, it is argued, a pseudo-Lucretian sensitivity to the parallelism between the structure of Latin words and the structure of the world coexists with a linguistic methodology that approximates the Marinesque. Etymological play and bilingual punning enables the neo-Latin poetic text to serve both as a microcosm of the literary contexts in which these devices are employed, and as a reinvention of the artifice, extravagant conceits, and baroque wit of Marinism. The result is a neo-Latin ‘echoing song’ that is both intra- and intertextual. Through bilingual punning and phonological wit Marvell plays with a classical language only to demonstrate its transformative potential. The chapter concludes by discussing the labyrinthine punning and sense of displacement in Hortus in relation to the garden sections of Marino’s L’Adone, in which an extravagantly luscious setting ultimately confounds the senses.