This edition provides both professional critics and casual readers with a methodical aid to appreciating what the author believes to be the most aesthetically eventful, unobtrusively playful, and undemanding complex long poem of the English Renaissance. Using line-by-line annotation, the edition strives to pay minute and continuous attention to the workings of the poem's dazzlingly protean wit, to its multiple, often breathtakingly artful, internal coherences. While the edition does all the usual work a scholarly annotation is expected to do, it is particularly focused on accomplishing what has not been done by previous Marvell scholarship: laying bare every instance of the poem's dynamic wit. In doing so, it, in particular, alerts Marvell's readers to such, for the most part, non-interpretive, aspects of the poem as associative connections operating on the periphery of one's conscious experience, palpable or merely hinted-at wordplay, coexisting multiple syntaxes, and patterns of formal and informal phonic coherence.
The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell is the most comprehensive and informative collection of essays ever assembled dealing with the life and writings of the poet and politician Andrew Marvell (1621-78). Like his friend and colleague John Milton, Marvell is now seen as a dominant figure in the literary landscape of the mid-seventeenth century, producing a stunning oeuvre of poetry and prose either side of the Restoration. In the 1640s and 1650s he was the author of hypercanonical lyrics like 'To His Coy Mistress' and 'The Garden' as well as three epoch-defining poems about Oliver Cromwell. After 1660 he virtually invented the verse genre of state satire as well as becoming the most influential prose satirist of the day—in the process forging a long-lived reputation as an incorruptible patriot. Although Marvell himself was an intensely private and self-contained character, whose literary, religious, and political commitments are notoriously difficult to discern, the interdisciplinary contributions by an array of experts in the fields of seventeenth-century literature, history, and politics gathered together in the Handbook constitute a decisive step forward in our understanding of him. They offer a fully-rounded account of his life and writings, individual readings of his key works, considerations of his relations with his major contemporaries, and surveys of his rich and varied afterlives. Informed by the wealth of editorial and biographical work on Marvell that has been produced in the last twenty years, the volume is both a conspectus of the state of the art in Marvell studies and the springboard for future research.
This text studies the poetry and polemics of early modern writer Andrew Marvell. It situates Marvell and his writings within the patronage networks and political upheavals of mid-17th century England.
Professor Colie brings together all previous and partial perspectives on Andrew Marvell, adds new ones harvested from her own deep learning and wide research, and transforms the whole into what Professor Joseph Summers of the University of Michigan has called "the best critical book on Marvell's poetry." Rich in details and knowledge of seventeenth-century English poetry, aesthetics, Renaissance and Baroque literature and art, and critical theory, "My Ecchoing Song" first examines Marvell's uses of theme and device in various lyrics. Later parts of the book concentrate on "Upon Appleton House" and "The Garden," which Professor Colie reads from the various focuses of political history, Marvell's knowledge and use of emblems and classical authors, contemporary theology, philosophy, and painting. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
'Matthew C. Augustine has managed to achieve, if not the impossible, then something vanishingly rare in the genre of literary biography. In tracing the frequently intricate links between Marvell's writings and their contexts, he engages (and often challenges) readers familiar with the terrain while providing enough guidance to newcomers to make them feel welcome. Most valuable are the analyses of poems that have received less critical attention than the acknowledged masterpieces, but which are deeply suggestive about the life and character of the man who produced them.' - Joanna Picciotto, Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA, author of Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (2010). This book provides an accessible account of the poet and politician Andrew Marvell's life (1621-1678) and of the great events which found reflection in his work and in which he and his writings eventually played a part. At the same time, considerable space is afforded to reflecting deeply on the modes and meanings of Marvell's art, redressing the balance of recent biography and criticism which has tended to dwell on the public and political aspects of this literary life at the expense of lyric invention and lyric possibility. Moving beyond the familiar terms of imitation and influence, the book aims at reconstructing an embodied history of reading and writing, acts undertaken within a series of complex physical and social environments, from the Hull Charterhouse to the coffee houses and print shops of Restoration London. Care has been taken to cover the whole of Marvell's career, in verse and prose, even as the book places the lyric achievement at the centre of its vision.
Introduction : the private labors of public men -- Rabelais in a pickle : fixing flux in Le quart livre -- Spenser's secret recipes : life support in The faerie queene -- Correcting Montaigne : agitation and care in the Essais -- Marvell in the meantime : preserving patriarchy in Upon Appleton House -- Milton's storehouses : tempering futures in Areopagitica, Paradise lost, and Paradise regain'd -- Conclusion : a woman's work is never done.
The Poems of Andrew Marvell With an introduction and notes by G.A. Aitken Letters Translated by A. B Grosart Most of Marvell's poems on political subjects doubtless appeared as broadsides or pamphlets at the time they were written; but of these original issues one only is known to have survived. "The Character of Holland," written in 1653, printed early, probably, in that year, appears to have been reprinted, in folio, in 1665, with the omission of the latter portion, in which praise was given to Blake and other commanders of the Commonwealth. This mutilated version was again printed, in quarto, in 1672. "The first Anniversary of the Government under his Highness the Lord Protector" was printed, in quarto, by Thomas Newcomb, London, in 1665. "Advice to a Painter" was printed as a four-page folio sheet, without date, but apparently in 1679, after Marvell's death. It is not necessary to justify any effort to make Marvell's Poems more widely known. The sole object of this Preface is to acknowledge my indebtedness to my predecessors, who have, in a greater or less degree, done good service by keeping the poet's name and character in the minds of his countrymen. In 1681, more than two years after Marvell's death, his widow published a collection of his miscellaneous poems. Nearly half a century later Cooke brought out an edition which included the political satires. These pieces could not, of course, be given in the volume of 1681, but they had been printed among other State Poems after the Revolution. Another half century passed before Thompson published an edition of the whole of Marvell's works. Thompson was a Hull captain, and a connection of the poet's family, filled with enthusiasm for his subject, but wanting in the critical training necessary for complete success. In spite, however, of all his shortcomings, it is not to be forgotten that we owe to him some of Marvell's finest poems, and that he was the first to print a large number of Marvell's letters, which are of great assistance in studying his life and writings. Errors in the text grew in number in subsequent cheap editions of the poems, until, in 1872, a century after Thompson, and when I was a scholar at the old Granmiar School at Hull which claimed Marvell as one of its most distinguished pupils, Dr. Grosart published the first volume of a limited edition of Marvell's works. It may be said that that edition was the first in which any serious attempt was made to give an accurate text, or to explain the constant allusions to contemporary events. But greatly as I have been indebted to Dr. Grosarfs work, much remained to be done. Many allusions remained unexplained, while some of the notes upon historical events or persons were written under misapprehension, and the errors in identification led to mistakes in the dating of the poems. In so difficult a field it is not probable that I have entirely escaped pitfalls; and I do not forget that it is far easier to correct others than to be a pioneer.
He is known chiefly for his brilliant lyric poems, including "The Garden," "The Definition of Love," "Bermudas," "To His Coy Mistress," and the "Horatian Ode" to Cromwell. Marvell's work is marked by extraordinary variety, ranging from incomparable lyric explorations of the inner life to satiric poems on the famous men and important issues of his time-one of the most politically volatile epochs in England's history. From the lover's famous admonition, "Had we but World enough, and Time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime," to the image of the solitary poet "Annihilating all that's made / To a green Thought in a green Shade," Marvell's poetry has earned a permanent place in the canon and in the hearts of poetry lovers.
