This chapter explores georgic writing that appeared during the second half of the seventeenth century, with special attention to engagements with civil war and its aftermaths. The discussion also attends closely to Virgilian strains in English georgic writing and to the significances of literary imitation and translation. Authors covered include Andrew Marvell, John Evelyn, Abraham Cowley, John Milton, Joseph Addison and John Dryden, as well as the ancient writers Hesiod and Virgil.

Sherman argues that Marvell contributes to the secularization of the ars moriendi by exploring problems of taste in scenes of death. Sherman situates Marvell’s interest in taste by glancing at French and Italian forays into literary aesthetics and by Marvell’s own disquisitions on offensive style in his prose polemics. It is no surprise then to find Marvell experimenting with problems of good and bad taste in poems describing death like 'An Horatian Ode', 'The Unfortunate Lover', 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn', and in the tableaus featuring the demise of Captain Douglas. Sherman suggests that Marvell taps into Catholic iconography associated with the arts of dying to overstep the bounds of aesthetic and rhetorical decorum. He appropriates the sensuality of the Counter-Reformation’s aesthetic exalting the martyred body and the literature of tears (ars lachrimandi). With his focus on moments of sudden death, Marvell casts doubt on the value of preparing for a good death, instead preferring to observe how beauty is cut down in its prime. In this way, Marvell’s poetry of memorialization aestheticizes mortality and the work of mourning.

This chapter argues that Andrew Marvell’s skepticism hones an aesthetic sensibility attuned to the sublime effects of fluctuating appearances, a skeptical apprehension of the sublime that contributes to the budding culture of taste. Giorgio Agamben supports the linking of skepticism and aesthetics since he sees taste as “an excessive sense, situated at the very limit of knowledge and pleasure,” explaining that “aesthetics takes as its object a knowledge that is not known” (2017, 51, 66). Marvell’s lyric poetry demonstrates the aesthetic pleasures afforded by a skeptical sensibility, even as it charts the emergence of the aesthete from the godly individual struggling to understand radical historical change and his role in the divine plan. Certain poems explore the intersections of secular and kairotic time, terms borrowed from Charles Taylor. His spectator poems show how the problematics of vision become secularized. If the deceptions of the eye in prior decades elicited the correction of both religious reformers and the early scientific establishment, here the wayward gaze is no longer an obstacle to truthful perception, but rather an occasion for enchantment.