A short life of the author
Andrew Marvell is one of the most celebrated and most elusive poets in the English language — a writer whose lyric poems are among the glories of seventeenth-century literature, but who published almost none of them in his lifetime, preferring to devote his public career to politics, polemic, and satire. His posthumous Miscellaneous Poems (1681), published three years after his death by a woman who claimed to be his widow, contained a body of work — “To His Coy Mistress,” “The Garden,” “The Mower Against Gardens,” “Upon Appleton House,” “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” “The Definition of Love” — that has placed Marvell permanently among the greatest English poets.
Life and Politics
Marvell was born in 1621 at Winestead, Yorkshire, the son of an Anglican clergyman. He was educated at Hull Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he briefly converted to Catholicism before his father pulled him back. After his father’s death by drowning in 1641, Marvell spent four years travelling in Europe — Holland, France, Italy, and Spain — during the English Civil War, a period of deliberate absence that has fascinated biographers seeking to understand his politics.
Upon his return to England, he served as tutor to Mary Fairfax, daughter of Lord Fairfax, the former Parliamentary general, at the great estate of Nun Appleton in Yorkshire. This period (1650–1652) produced many of his finest poems, including “Upon Appleton House,” a vast country-house poem that uses the estate as a lens through which to examine England’s political and spiritual condition. He subsequently tutored a ward of Oliver Cromwell and was recommended for a government post by John Milton, with whom he formed a lasting friendship.
In 1659, Marvell was elected Member of Parliament for Hull, a seat he held until his death, making him one of the longest-serving MPs of the Restoration period. He was a shrewd and independent politician who defended religious toleration and parliamentary liberties against the encroachments of the Crown. His political prose — particularly The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672–1673), a brilliant satirical attack on the intolerance of the Anglican establishment, and An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (1677), an anonymous pamphlet warning of Catholic and absolutist conspiracies — was widely read and deeply influential, though his authorship of the latter was concealed during his lifetime for fear of prosecution.
The Poetry
Marvell’s lyric poems are characterised by a combination of qualities rarely found together: the intellectual complexity and paradox of the Metaphysical school, the sensuous beauty of Cavalier poetry, and a coolness of tone that is entirely his own. “To His Coy Mistress” — the most famous carpe diem poem in English after Herrick’s “To the Virgins” — moves from playful hyperbole to terrifying images of mortality to a final assertion of passionate urgency with a logical structure as tight as a syllogism.
“The Garden” is perhaps the most perfect of his poems: a meditation on the superiority of contemplative solitude to active life, set in a garden where the speaker’s mind “withdraws into its happiness” and achieves a state of almost mystical union with the green world. “The Mower Against Gardens” reverses the convention, arguing that cultivation is a violation of nature’s purity. “The Definition of Love” is a metaphysical conceit of extraordinary compression, comparing two lovers who can never meet to parallel lines that extend to infinity.
The “Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” (1650) is the most politically complex poem of the seventeenth century — a poem that simultaneously praises Cromwell’s power and laments the execution of Charles I, that admires the energy of revolution while acknowledging the nobility of the old order it destroyed. T.S. Eliot called it “one of the great poems of the English language” and observed that its greatness lay precisely in its refusal to simplify.
Reputation
Marvell’s lyric poetry was largely unknown until the twentieth century. The Miscellaneous Poems of 1681 attracted little attention and was overshadowed by the works of Dryden and Pope. It was T.S. Eliot’s essay “Andrew Marvell” (1921) that began the modern revaluation, praising Marvell’s “tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace” and identifying in his work a quality — the union of thought and feeling — that Eliot found lacking in later English poetry.
Since then, Marvell has been continuously read, anthologised, and studied. “To His Coy Mistress” is one of the most widely taught poems in the English language. His political writings have attracted increasing attention from historians of the Restoration period.
Collecting Marvell
Miscellaneous Poems (Robert Boulter, London, 1681, folio) is one of the most important books of English poetry. The first edition exists with cancels in some copies where poems praising Cromwell were removed after the Restoration — copies with the cancelled leaves intact are exceedingly rare and valuable. The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672–1673) in first edition is a major work of English prose satire. Modern scholarly editions — particularly Nigel Smith’s edition of the poems for Longman (2003; revised 2007) — are the standard reference texts.