Environmental Conflict and the Politics of Localism in <em>Upon Appleton House</em>

This essay places Marvell's Upon Appleton House amidst the ongoing transformation of the landscape in South Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire caused by improvement efforts by local landowners and the government and especially their attempts to drain the area’s fenlands. In doing so, it argues that the poem’s immersion in the South Yorkshire countryside should be seen as an intensification of the poem’s political commentary, an acknowledgement of, and investigation into, the enmeshing of landscape and environment in the fraught debates over local rights and a centralized state roiling the country in the summer of 1651. In its arresting details, its tactile and often unsettling images of this landscape, the poem suggests an alternative to the abstract and homogenizing power of a centralized state. In this way, the poem stands as one of our most lasting and distinctive paeans to a vernacular landscape under pressure. Nonetheless, even as it demonstrates the power of this particular aesthetic form to represent such a variegated natural world, in its self-conscious and persistent ironies, its refusal to allow the reader to settle into its naturalist idylls, it admits the dangers of such potentially comforting and idle aestheticization.