Andrew Marvell

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The English poet and politician Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), one of the writers of the 17th century most admired by the 20th, composed lyric poetry which is sensuous, witty, elegant, and sometimes passionate.

Were Andrew Marvell not a major poet in his own right, he might be regarded primarily as a fascinating transitional figure. His work is deeply under the influence of John Donne and the metaphysical school, yet it shares its formal elegance and smoothness with the "tribe of Ben," the poets who clustered about the influential Ben Jonson and came to form the Cavalier school. Furthermore he was a protégéand disciple of John Milton, whose intense and broad-ranging participation in Renaissance philosophical, poetic, and theological traditions finds its counterpart in his own work. Like Milton, he wrote considerable poetry devoted to contemporary political questions, and he wrote verse satire akin to that of John Dryden, who is generally seen as the leading spirit of a new age.

Marvell was born on March 31, 1621, at Winestead-in-Holderness, Yorkshire. His father, a Calvinistic Anglican clergyman, became master of the Charterhouse, an almshouse, and preacher at Holy Trinity Church in Hull, where the family moved in 1624; the poet's mother was to die in 1638, his father in 1641. In 1633 Marvell began his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained until 1641, receiving a bachelor of arts degree in 1639. Late in his Trinity years, a plausible tradition holds, Marvell was converted to Roman Catholicism by persuasive Jesuits but was promptly brought back to the Anglican faith by his father. By the outbreak of the civil war in 1642 Marvell's academic career had ended short of his completing a master of arts degree, perhaps as a result of his father's accidental death, and he began a 4-year sojourn in Europe, probably tutoring the son of a well-to-do family.

First Works

Though in poems written between 1645 and 1649 he had evinced royalist sympathies, Marvell seems to have been attracted by the strong personality of Oliver Cromwell, and in 1650 he wrote "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland." Commonly acknowledged a masterful piece of political poetry, this ode has occasioned some controversy as to the degree of unqualified admiration with which the poet regards the military harshness of the Puritan general.

For 2 or 3 years beginning in 1651, Marvell was tutor to Mary Fairfax, daughter of Lord General Fairfax, a retired Commonwealth general who lived at Nun Appleton, and here he wrote some memorable poems. Among them are the lovely "Music's Empire" and "Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax," a complex and sophisticated compliment to Mary Fairfax consisting of almost 400 octosyllabic couplets in which landscape description serves emblematically to convey political and philosophical ideals.

Political Career

In 1653 Milton attempted unsuccessfully to have Marvell made his assistant as Latin secretary (a position like that of secretary of state) to Cromwell; instead Marvell became tutor to a young ward of Cromwell named William Dutton. He tutored first at Eton, in the house of a man who had been to Bermuda and may possibly have provided the inspiration for the charming "Bermudas," in which a tropical island is presented as a Puritan paradise. Later, his tutoring duties took him to France.

In 1657 Marvell was appointed Latin secretary himself and remained in office until the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. He continued to write political poetry, much of it celebrating his admiration for Cromwell, such as "The First Anniversary of the Government under Oliver Cromwell" in 1655 and "Upon the Death of O.C." in 1658. In 1659 he was elected member of Parliament for Hull and served in the House of Commons for the rest of his life. Unlike the tempestuous Milton, however, Marvell was not an embattled and passionately committed politician but rather a quiet civil servant. In 1662 he served with the British minister in Holland; in 1663 he embarked on 2 years of diplomatic missions to Russia, Denmark, and Sweden. The latter years of his life were devoted to his service to the government, to the composition of political satire in verse, and to the writing of prose dealing with contemporary issues. He is said to have protected Milton from the vindictiveness of the new royal government after the Restoration - not the least of his contributions to poetry. He died on Aug. 16, 1678, of a fever compounded by medical treatment, still a bachelor. In 1681 his housekeeper published Miscellaneous Poems by Andrew Marvell, Esq., the basis of his reputation as a poet.

Assessment of His Poetry

To the student of cultural history, Marvell's poetry is a fascinating amalgam of intellectual currents of his age - stoicism, Christian Platonism, antischolastic mysticism - and an Anglican sense of the order and harmony of nature. To the historian of poetry, his achievement is remarkable for its balance between a never-abandoned wit and dramatic atmosphere reminiscent of Donne, a precision and verbal elegance modeled on Horace and other classical poets, a detachment and metrical sophistication shared with the Cavaliers, and a sensuous evocation of landscape shared with the classical pastoral tradition.

Most of the finest poems seem to have been composed in the 1650s; few of them are without central images of gardens. Perhaps the most famous of Marvell's lyrics is "To His Coy Mistress": "Had we but world enough and time,/ This coyness, Lady, were no crime…. / But at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near:/ And yonder all before us lie/ Deserts of vast eternity." Like many of Marvell's best poems, it masks extraordinary subtlety and complexity beneath a surface of smooth and deceptively simple octosyllabic couplets. It is, in fact, as perfect an example of the metaphysical mode as anything by Donne and, for all its cool and witty tone, a passionate lyric. Similarly powerful is "The Garden," whose sensuous images constitute a complex blending of Renaissance traditions that bear on the rival virtues of the active and the contemplative life; one of the most famous images in the poem is that of the mind, "that ocean where each kind/ Does straight its own resemblance find," withdrawn into itself and detached from the world, "Annihilating all that's made/ To a green thought in a green shade."

Further Reading

The most authoritative biography of Marvell is in French. In English, briefer and less reliable biographies are Augustine Birrell, Andrew Marvell (1905), and V. Sackville-West, Andrew Marvell (1929). Some of the most influential modern essays on Marvell - by Frank Kermode, Leo Spitzer, Douglas Bush, and Cleanth Brooks - are conveniently assembled in William R. Keast, ed., Seventeenth Century English Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism (1962). The seminal essay by T. S. Eliot (1921) is reprinted in his Selected Essays (1932; subsequent editions), and the essay by William Empson, "Marvell's Garden," in his Some Versions of Pastoral (1935). Most of Ruth C. Wallerstein's Studies in Seventeenth-century Poetic (1950) is devoted to Marvell. John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (1968), relates the poet's work to its political context, and Donald M. Friedman, Marvell's Pastoral Art (1970), relates the poems to literary and intellectual traditions. The literary background is best provided by Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660 (1945; 2d ed. 1962). Also recommended is Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (1934).

Additional Sources

Birrell, Augustine, Andrew Marvell, Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1978 c1905.

Craze, Michael, The life and lyrics of Andrew Marvell, New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1979.

Griffin, Patsy, The modest ambition of Andrew Marvell: a study of Marvell and his relation to Lovelace, Fairfax, Cromwell, and Milton, Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1995.

Hunt, John Dixon, Andrew Marvell: his life and writings, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978; London: P. Elek, 1978.

Sackville-West, V. (Victoria), Andrew Marvell, Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1974; Philadelphia: R. West, 1977.

Marvell, Andrew (1621-78). Satirist and poet. Son of a Yorkshire clergyman, Cambridge-educated, Marvell tutored Lord Fairfax's daughter and a ward of Cromwell's before being eventually appointed (1657) as assistant in the Latin secretaryship to Milton. Despite having served the Protectorate, he was able to accept the Restoration. He was elected MP for Hull in 1659 but, despite being moderately active in Parliament, was ineffective in the country party. Regarded by contemporaries as a political satirist, Marvell is now generally remembered as a metaphysical poet, eclectic but lyrical and delighting in nature.

Quotes:

"Two Paradises t'were in one, to live in Paradise alone."

"Self-preservation, nature's first great law, all the creatures, except man, doth awe."

"But at my back I always hear time's winged chariot hurrying near."

"The grave's a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace."

Andrew Marvell
Andrew Marvell
Born	31 March 1621(1621-03-31) Winestead, England
Died	16 August 1678 (aged 57) London, England
Occupation	Poet
Notable work(s)	"To His Coy Mistress", "The Garden", "An Horatian Ode"

Andrew Marvell (31 March 1621 – 16 August 1678) was an English metaphysical poet, Parliamentarian, and the son of a Church of England clergyman (also named Andrew Marvell). As a metaphysical poet, he is associated with John Donne and George Herbert. He was a colleague and friend of John Milton.

Marvell was born in Winestead-in-Holderness, East Riding of Yorkshire, near the city of Kingston upon Hull. The family moved to Hull when his father was appointed Lecturer at Holy Trinity Church there, and Marvell was educated at Hull Grammar School. A secondary school in the city is now named after him.

His most famous poems include To His Coy Mistress, The Garden, An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, and the Country House Poem, "Upon Appleton House".

Contents 1 Early life 2 First poems and Marvell's time at Nun Appleton 3 Anglo-Dutch War and employment as Latin secretary 4 After the Restoration 5 Views 6 Marvell's poetic style 7 Footnotes 8 Further reading 9 External links

Early life

At the age of thirteen, Marvell attended Trinity College, Cambridge and eventually received his BA degree.^[1] Afterwards, from the middle of 1642 onwards, Marvell probably travelled in continental Europe. He may well have served as a tutor for an aristocrat on the Grand Tour; but the facts are not clear on this point. While England was embroiled in the civil war, Marvell seems to have remained on the continent until 1647. It is not known exactly where his travels took him, except that he was in Rome in 1645 and Milton later reported that Marvell had mastered four languages, including French, Italian and Spanish.^[2]

First poems and Marvell's time at Nun Appleton

Marvell's first poems, which were written in Latin and Greek and published when he was still at Cambridge, lamented a visitation of the plague and celebrated the birth of a child to King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria. He only belatedly became sympathetic to the successive regimes during the Interregnum after Charles I's execution, which took place 30 January 1649. His Horatian Ode, a political poem dated to early 1650, responds with sorrow to the regicide even as it praises Oliver Cromwell's return from Ireland.^[3][4][5]

Circa 1650-52, Marvell served as tutor to the daughter of the Lord General Thomas Fairfax, who had recently relinquinshed command of the Parliamentary army to Cromwell. He lived during that time at Nun Appleton House, near York, where he continued to write poetry. One poem, Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax, uses a description of the estate as a way of exploring Fairfax's and Marvell's own situation in a time of war and political change. Probably the best-known poem he wrote at this time was To His Coy Mistress.

Anglo-Dutch War and employment as Latin secretary

During the period of increasing tensions leading up to the First Anglo-Dutch War of 1653, Marvell wrote the satirical "Character of Holland," repeating the then current stereotype of the Dutch as "drunken and profane": "This indigested vomit of the Sea,/ Fell to the Dutch by Just Propriety".

He became a tutor to Cromwell’s ward, William Dutton, in 1653, and moved to live with his pupil at the house of John Oxenbridge in Eton. Oxenbridge had made two trips to Bermuda, and it is thought that this inspired Marvell to write his poem Bermudas. He also wrote several poems in praise of Cromwell, who was by this time Lord Protector of England. In 1656 Marvell and Dutton travelled to France, to visit the Protestant Academy of Saumur.^[6][7]

In 1657, Marvell joined Milton, who by that time had lost his sight, in service as Latin secretary to Cromwell's Council of State at a salary of £200 a year, which represented financial security at that time. In 1659 he was elected to Parliament from his birthplace of Hull in Yorkshire, and was paid a rate of 6 shillings, 8 pence per day during sittings of parliament, a financial support derived from the contributions of his constituency ^[8]. This was a post Marvell soon lost in the changes that occurred to parliament in 1659, only to regain it in 1660, whereafter he held it until his death.

After the Restoration

A statue of Andrew Marvell, located in Trinity Square, Kingston upon Hull, UK

Oliver Cromwell died in 1658. He was succeeded as Lord Protector by his son Richard, but in 1660 the monarchy was restored to Charles II. Marvell eventually came to write several long and bitterly satirical verses against the corruption of the court. Although they circulated in manuscript form, and some found anonymous publication in print, they were too politically sensitive and thus dangerous to be published under his name until well after his death. He avoided punishment for his own cooperation with republicanism, while he helped convince the government of Charles II not to execute John Milton for his antimonarchical writings and revolutionary activities. The closeness of the relationship between the two former office mates is indicated by the fact that Marvell contributed an eloquent prefatory poem to the second edition of Milton's famous epic Paradise Lost. According to a biographer:

“

Skilled in the arts of self-preservation, he was not a toady.[9]

”

Marvell took up opposition to the 'court party', and satirised them anonymously. In his longest verse satire, Last Instructions to a Painter, written in 1667, Marvell responded to the political corruption that had contributed to English failures during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The poem did not find print publication until after the Revolution of 1688-9. The poem instructs an imaginary painter how to picture the state without a proper navy to defend them, led by men without intelligence or courage, a corrupt and dissolute court, and dishonest officials. Of another such satire, Samuel Pepys, himself a government official, commented in his diary, "Here I met with a fourth Advice to a Painter upon the coming in of the Dutch and the End of the War, that made my heart ake to read, it being too sharp and so true."

From 1659 until his death in 1678, Marvell was a conscientious member of Parliament, steadily reporting on parliamentary and national business to his constituency and serving as London agent for the Hull Trinity House, a shipmasters' guild. He went on two missions to the continent, one to Holland and the other encompassing Russia, Sweden, and Denmark. He also wrote anonymous prose satires criticizing the monarchy and Catholicism, defending Puritan dissenters, and denouncing censorship.

Marvell's pamphlet An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England, published in late 1677, claimed that:

“

There has now for diverse Years, a design been carried on, to change the Lawfull Government of England into an Absolute Tyranny, and to convert the established Protestant Religion into down-right Popery...[10]

”

John Kenyon described it as "one of the most influential pamphlets of the decade"^[11] and G. M. Trevelyan called it: "A fine pamphlet, which throws light on causes provocative of the formation of the Whig party".^[12]

Views

Although Marvell became a Parliamentarian, he was not a Puritan. He had flirted briefly with Catholicism as a youth, and was described in his thirties (on the Saumur visit) as "a notable English Italo-Machiavellian".^[13][14] During his lifetime, his prose satires were much better known than his verse^{[citation needed]}.

Andrew Marvell

A recent study by Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker of Washington University in St. Louis, has speculated that Marvell's lifelong struggle for individual rights may have been a result of his own inner struggle with homosexuality.^[15] Vincent Palmieri noted that Marvell is sometimes known as the "British Aristides" for his incorruptible integrity in life and poverty at death. Many of his poems were not published until 1681, two years after his death, from a collection owned by Mary Palmer, his housekeeper. After Marvell's death she lay dubious claim to having been his wife, from the time of a secret marriage in 1667.^[16]

Marvell's poetic style

Marvell’s poetry is often witty and full of elaborate conceits in the elegant style of the metaphysical poets. Many poems were inspired by events of the time, public or personal. The Picture of Little TC in a Prospect of Flowers was written about the daughter of one of Marvell's friends, Theophila Cornwell, who was named after an elder sister who had died as a baby. Marvell uses the picture of her surrounded by flowers in a garden to convey the transience of spring and the fragility of childhood.

Others were written in the pastoral style of the classical Roman authors. Even here, Marvell tends to place a particular picture before us. In The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn, the nymph weeps for the little animal as it dies, and tells us how it consoled her for her betrayal in love.

Marvell had keen eye for perspective^{[citation needed]}, and explored the options that genre presented him with. His pastoral poems, including Upon Appleton House achieve originality and a unique tone through his reworking and subversion of the genre.

Footnotes

1. ^ Marvell, Andrew in Venn, J. & J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922–1958.
2. ^ Nicholas Murray, Andrew Marvell (1999), pp. 24-35.
3. ^ Full title An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland.
4. ^ "Online text". Archived from the original on 2009-10-25. http://www.webcitation.org/5knFkAQxK. 
5. ^ http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/marvell-per-newcrits.html
6. ^ http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/timeline.htm
7. ^ Nicholas Murray, Andrew Marvell (1999), pp. 92-3.
8. ^ John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, Chapter X, last paragraph (p.369 Oxford World's Classic edition, On Liberty And Other Essays, 1991, reed. 1998
9. ^ Nicholas Murray, Andrew Marvell (1999), p. 117.
10. ^ Andrew Marvell, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (Gregg International Publishers Limited, 1971), p. 3.
11. ^ John Kenyon, The Popish Plot (Phoenix, 2000), p. 24.
12. ^ G. M. Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts (Routledge, 2002), p. 513.
13. ^ http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/Old%20Site/lists/MarvellDates.htm
14. ^ Robert R. Hay, An Andrew Marvell Companion (Routledge, 1998), p. 101.
15. ^ Derek Hirst, Steven N. Zwicker, "Andrew Marvell and the Toils of Patriarchy: Fatherhood, Longing, and the Body Politic", English Literary History, Volume 66, Number 3, Fall 1999, pp. 629-654.
16. ^ Nicholas Murray, Andrew Marvell (1999), pp. 296-9.

Further reading

• A. B. Chambers (1991), Andrew Marvell and Edmund Waller: Seventeenth-Century Praise and Restoration Satire
• Kenneth R. Friedenreich (1978; Archon Books, Hamden CT) Tercentenary Essays in Honor of Andrew Marvell

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Andrew Marvell

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Andrew Marvell

• Andrew Marvell's Grave
• Andrew Marvell at Project Gutenberg by Augustine Birrell
• Andrew Marvell index entry at Poets' Corner
• Andrew Marvell Biography, Critical Analysis of his Poems - Crossref-it.info

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