M arvell, A ndrew

Abstract

Andrew Marvell (1621–78) is generally acknowledged to be the finest lyric poet of the mid‐seventeenth century, and his ‘An Horatian ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland’ (1650) is often described as the greatest political poem in English. The widespread appreciation of Marvell's qualities as a poet developed only in the twentieth century and was advanced in particular by T. S. Eliot's treatment of Marvell in his hugely influential 1921 essays ‘Andrew Marvell’ and ‘The metaphysical poets’. From his death in 1678 until the late nineteenth century Marvell was known rather for his activities as the member of parliament for Hull in the Restoration and as the writer of prose satires challenging the corruption of Restoration politics and arguing for religious toleration. Marvell's star as a poet rose as the modernist movement looked to separate poetry from history and as the founders of English as a university discipline sought to establish practical criticism as its distinguishing mode of enquiry. Marvell the ‘metaphysical’ lyric poet rose to prominence as ‘the creator of an acutely private art’, valued by intellectuals who ‘felt a severance from the civilization that both created and threatened them’ (Everett 1991). In the twenty‐first century, however, scholars have in the main sought to recover both the interest and importance of Marvell's political activities and prose writings, and to contextualize his political poetry within the complicated historical events and diverse allegiances of the 1640s and 1650s. While historicist scholars have looked to bring the lyric poet and political pamphleteer together and to make sense of Marvell's career as a whole, the lyric verse that used to receive most attention, such as the ‘green’ pastoral poems, has been less to the fore in recent critical work. However, those scholars who would recover the place of Marvell's poems in history or would reconstruct his biography still find themselves faced with the opaque relationship between private and public in the life and work of a secretive man who did not put any of his lyric poems into print in his lifetime, and about whom we still do not know basic biographical facts such as when he wrote most of his verse or whether he was married. Indeed the ‘ambiguity’ of Marvell's verse celebrated by critics like William Empson (1930) has found its biographical correlative in ingenious speculation about Marvell's political allegiances and sexual preferences. Understanding Marvell presents a stringent challenge to both the biographer and the literary critic.