Tracce sonore nel codice poetico del Seicento inglese: “Musicks Empire” di Andrew Marvell

As regards the relationships between poetry and music in seventeenth-century English literature, Andrew Marvell’s contribution has not been adequately defined yet: when scholars have examined it, they have often limited themselves to confirming the presence of traditional metaphorical interpretations or established topoi (e.g. laus musicae) in his poems. This essay intends to analyse Marvell’s poem Musicks Empire (M1: 47) – which shows how Marvell’s predilection for music "ne le distingue pas a vrai dire de ses contemporaines" (P. Legouis) - from the explicit interdisciplinary orientation of musico-literary criticism by taking into account the frequent processes of transcodification from literature to music and viceversa that characterized literary culture in sixteenth-century England.