A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body

Abstract

Critics neglected this poem until Bradbrook and Lloyd Thomas gave it two pages in Andrew Marvell (Cambridge University Press, 1940). It burst out into sudden blaze in 1953 when F. R. Leavis of Cambridge quarrelled with F. W. Bateson of Oxford over it. Bateson had written it down as a semi-grotesque, near-farcical product of the late 1640s when the aristocratic fashion for emblems and allegory was tottering to ruin with the Court. Leavis would have none of this. ‘The poem is among Marvell’s supreme things’, he wrote in Scrutiny ‘profoundly original and a proof of genius.’ He took its theme to be the difficulty of distinguishing between the Body and the Soul. In a weak rejoinder Bateson did not fasten on the doubtfulness of that. (Michael Wilding, Marvell (Macmillan, 1969), pp.165–81).