Diotima’s Scaffolding: Marvell’s Politics and the Neoplatonic View of Love in the Mower Poems and ‘The Definition of Love’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When read alongside Diotima’s Ladder of Love, recounted in the Symposium, Marvell’s mower poems and ‘The Definition of Love’ seem to be deeply political works. They do not, however, appear to take deeply political positions. They situate their speakers and characters in terms comparable to the Ladder of Love. In so doing, they show a Christian humanist use of love that accounts for Marvell’s neutral wit. Our poet created mirrors for gentry in republican England that encouraged the creation and maintenance of networks based on love. His focus moves away from national politics toward county life and the need to move past the parliamentary-royalist divide. In short, by reading these four poems beside the Ladder of Love, we better understand how Marvell manages to be political without clearly expressing his religious or political positions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".