Literalizing Value: Poetry, Evaluation, and the Market in Marvell’s ‘The Last Instructions’

Andrew Marvell’s poetic choices, especially his tendency to literalize metaphors, reveal a dissatisfaction with the growing prevalence of market exchanges in seventeenth-century England. Although his verse satire ‘The Last Instructions to a Painter’ defends trade against the encroachments of the excise tax, as would be characteristic of a member of Parliament, it also demonstrates a striking aversion to comparative evaluation. ‘The Last Instructions’ also provides an important supplement to readings of Marvell’s literalizing propensities in other poems, like ‘The Garden’. Marvell’s portrait of trade and value in Restoration England, during the growth of a liberal market regime and the development of finance capital, also has important implications for modern assumptions about productivity and value. This early modern poet anticipates and presciently critiques the ubiquity of consumerist evaluation in our modern world. However, Marvell’s verse does not outline an alternative system of social relations: in that respect, even his verse satire does not have much faith in the political power of irony. Instead, these poems turn to literalization so as to advocate withdrawal from a world that asks little more of us than acquiescence to a totalizing web of assessment and evaluation.