After nine months in Ireland, Cromwell is recalled to London. Andrew Marvell writes “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return,” an ambiguous encomium. In Ireland, Cromwell’s early return to London is largely forgotten in public memory. By revising existing English-language discussions of Ireland, and incorporating its demographic variety into an emerging idea of “the Irish,” Milton contributes to reconceptualizing Ireland from pluralist variety to a new, flatter pairing, “the Irish” and “the English.” The Cromwellian conquest produces a stronger Irish Catholic identitarian response, as can be seen in the November 1649 meeting of “The Archbishops, Bishops, and other Prelates” at Clonmacnoise (and their subsequent, 1650 publication, to which Cromwell and Milton both responded). Around the same time that Certaine Actes and Declarations of the Clonmacnoise conference was published, the Council of State assigned Milton the task of responding to Defensio Regia pro Carolina I, by Salmasius. Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland is wrapped into Milton’s response, known in English as A Defence of the People of England (1651).

This chapter argues that the concept of singularity is particularly helpful in examining what is distinctive about the reader's or listener's experience of a poem of literary quality. The chapter compares singularity to comparable concepts, such as difference, uniqueness, and originality, and it argues that singularity has two especially important features: a relation to generality and a relation to the event. This means that singularity is something that happens, something that the reader or listener experiences, rather than an unchanging object independent of readers and listeners. As something that happens, the singularity of a poem may work with, as well as against, conventions shared by other poems. Treating examples by Andrew Marvell, Christina Rossetti, and others, the chapter concludes that a singular poem is singular precisely through its arrangement of poetic conventions, shared social discourses, and general linguistic codes.

This chapter considers seventeenth-century poetic works that take various positions, implicitly or explicitly, on the question of the relationship between human and divine creation: Margaret Cavendish’s prose fiction Blazing World, biblical creation epics by Guillaume Du Bartas and Lucy Hutchinson, and topographical poems by Sir John Denham and Andrew Marvell. Cavendish and Marvell suggest that it is prideful and misleading to assume that humans can discover truth about divine creation by natural means; Du Bartas and Denham, by contrast, tend to collapse the distance between humans and God, frequently casting God as an “architect” or other type of human creator. Situated between these two groups is Hutchinson, who believes humans can gain insights into God’s ways by looking at our own—but these insights are only ever shadowy and partial and frequently need to be supplemented by divine revelation.

The rise of the epigram, that most distinctively early modern genre, emerged from the confluence of several elements of literary culture, including humanist Latin epigrams; the distinct (though related) tradition of moralizing and didactic distichs and other short poems; the role of verse composition in schools and universities; and the increasingly important role of translation and bilingual circulation. This chapter outlines the relationship between Latin and English epigram in England between the mid-sixteenth and the later seventeenth century: in doing so, it builds upon previous work which has concentrated on the English-language tradition, and extends the chronological range of the existing studies, none of which ranges beyond 1640. By focusing in particular upon the ways in which epigrams circulated in the manuscript record, it treats epigram culture as a bilingual phenomenon, the bilingualism of which evolved over the course of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and demonstrates how thekind of‘witty’, topical and frequently satiric epigram, which most critical work has prioritized, sits within a broader and on average more serious and more generalizing literary phenomenon.

This chapter turns to a third influential facet of the Horatian lyric tradition: the development in English literary culture of the major political ode. Unlike moralizing lyric or psalm paraphrase, this form, of which the most famous early modern example is Andrew Marvell’s 1650 ‘Horatian Ode on Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, made a relatively late appearance in English poetry, with only scattered and marginally canonical examples (such as those by Jonson, Drayton and Fanshawe) prior to Marvell.

This chapter therefore seeks to answer two related questions. What are the defining features of the political ode in early modern England, taking into account the full panoply of the Latin (and, for these purposes, primarily neo-Latin) tradition? And how different do the landmarks of English achievement in this form – including poems by Jonson and Drayton as well as Marvell and Cowley – appear if read within the Latin literary context from which they emerged? It identifies several phases in the maturing of the formal panegyric ode as written in England in the latter sixteenth century before the form entered the vernacular.

Several of the most remarkable political poems of the mid-seventeenth century, including Marvell’s ‘First Anniversary’ (1655) and Dryden’s ‘Astraea Redux’ (1660), belong to a genre which has not been clearly defined in English literature. These substantial poems, each of several hundred lines, derive elements from a range of panegyric forms, including the tradition of the political ode discussed in ; but the main generic model for poetry of this sort, which is little represented in English before Marvell’s ‘First Anniversary’, is the panegyric epic of the late antique poet Claudian: a genre, new to Latin when Claudian began writing, which combined the techniques of prose panegyric with contemporary (rather than mythological) epic. This chapter seeks to set the major seventeenth-century English examples of this form – as well as a handful of English-language precursors – within the wider context of a Latin genre which, though now obscure, was both widely understood and frequently composed throughout early modern Europe.

This chapter examines some of the Market Hill poems, which Swift wrote during bouts of intense creativity while in semi-retirement in the north of Ireland in the late 1720s. A subseries of poems written to, and in the guise of, the author’s hosts explicitly turn away from such famous works as Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ or Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ by moving inward: whereas the ideal poem in this mode celebrates a grand home as the material manifestation of the owner’s impeccable qualities, Swift instead voices the hostess as a trainee vexer, the host as a cruel dullard, the staff as aggravated upstarts, and even himself, in the character of an unwelcome if noteworthy houseguest. The gentrified British pastoral gives away to Irish realism. The satirical panegyrical ode has become a vehicle of self-critique. In markedly different ways, whether risibly or aggressively, the Market Hill poems deal with the Dean’s uncertain legacy as a Hibernian Patriot, a hard-worn but easily dashed image. This chapter ends with an examination of a shortlived but excessive verse war conducted with a rival cleric poet from Dublin who sought to tarnish Swift’s reputation.