Andrew Marvell
Poet, Wit and Witness
Nicholas von MaltzahnA revealing portrait of Andrew Marvell, poet, polemicist and political witness
Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) remains one of the most admired poets in the English language, celebrated for the wit, beauty and imaginative power of works such as ‘To His Coy Mistress’, ‘The Garden’ and ‘Upon Appleton House’. Yet the man behind these poems has often remained elusive. Drawing on three decades of groundbreaking scholarship, Nicholas von Maltzahn brings Marvell vividly to life, revealing how his poetry, political commitments and personal experiences were shaped by the upheavals of the English Revolution and the Restoration. From lyric genius to fierce polemicist, Marvell emerges as a writer whose private verse and public writings illuminate each other in unexpected ways.
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Nicholas von Maltzahn’s book is that rare accomplishment, an authoritative combination of literary and biographical insight. Career-long scholarship and reflection, lightly worn and crisply deployed, take us inside the imaginative journey of Marvell’s poems and prose while placing them in the cultural, political and religious contexts of his troubled times. It is a richly productive approach which yields so many fresh perceptions as to give us the sense of meeting Marvell anew.
'Blair Worden, Emeritus Fellow, St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford
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Here is a biography befitting its subject: elegant, compact, and witty. Nobody else has Nicholas von Maltzahn’s command of the Marvell archives. And now he deftly guides us into the world of the poet and polemicist, and into a remarkable mind at once gloomy and humane, taciturn and possessed of peerless verbal acumen.
'Feisal G. Mohamed, Professor of English, Yale University, and author of Sovereignty
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In this excellent new biography, Nicholas von Maltzahn offers us considerable new insight into the enigma of Milton’s great contemporary, Andrew Marvell. Informed by the latest research, Von Maltzahn is perceptive and nuanced in this admirably lucid inquiry into the evolving relationship between the poet’s life and his writing. The taciturn Marvell who appears here may be a “man of few words,” but his penetrating intelligence renders him vulnerable to a myriad rival impulses – emotional, sexual, and political. As Von Maltzahn’s Marvell struggles to master these impulses and produce the “wiser art” of poems like “The Garden,” his real-life agon does much to explain the irregular baroque quality of his poetry – highly polished but contorted, elaborate, like the agony of his same-sex love as its represented in the “Definition,” begotten “by Despair / Upon Impossibility.” This is a fascinating book and should be read by everyone interested in poetry and the culture of seventeenth-century English life.
'Paul Stevens, Professor of English, University of Toronto
Introduction: A Man of Very Few Words
1 Hull
2 Aspiration
3 Apprentice to the World
4 Poet
5 Wiser Art
6 The Protector Poet
7 Parliament and Satire
8 Marvell embattled: the satirist in prose
9 Dying
Chronology
References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index
Nicholas von Maltzahn is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Ottawa. His publications include an edition of Marvell’s Account of the Growth of Popery for The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell (2003) and An Andrew Marvell Chronology (2005).