Recent scholarship on the early modern period has stressed the roles that space (as socially constructed and constructing) and time (as “queer” or nonlinear) play in shaping subjectivity. This paper will advance these analyses, by turning to the mid-seventeenth-century British Civil Wars (1638-1651) to explore domestic warfare’s traumatic impact on the shifting spatial and temporal dimensions of poetic and national identity. More specifically, it will focus on Andrew Marvell’s poems written to and about the Parliamentary General, Sir Thomas Fairfax, in the early 1650s. Literary scholars too often treat the British Civil Wars as primarily defined by metaphoric battles of words, bracketing civil violence and its rupturing effects.  By contrast, I set Marvell’s poetry within both the messy material realities of early modern warfare and the busy, emerging news culture that reported these realities. Drawing on these newsbook reports, Marvell’s poems initially seem to offer war and militarism as ordering principles that create disciplined visions of homogenous, surveyable space and progressive, linear temporality, which in turn anchor the poet and patron’s identities and help define the new English Commonwealth. However, these ordered visions rapidly gave way to disorienting images of violence as a force that disrupts and deforms local and national history and landscape. In “Upon Appleton House,” for example, as Marvell’s persona leaves the disciplined military garden of the Fairfax estate, the poem presents a series of increasingly uncanny encounters between the poet and a violent, alien past and a threatening, even phantasmagoric terrain. In doing so, it reveals both the poet’s persona, and national identity more generally, to be mutating into varieties of formlessness under pressure of recent armed conflict. Marvell, and other poets of this “climacteric” period, that is, reveal a British identity shorn of its stable spatio-temporal coordinates by civil war, and therefore caught at a moment of suspended uncertainty and prolonged transformation into a not-yet-known.

—Catharine Gray, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign