Andrew Marvell

by abdo Wed Apr 06, 2011 2:56 pm

Andrew
Marvell

Andrew Marvell
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] Andrew Marvell
Born	31 March 1621(1621-03-31) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Died	16 August 1678(1678-08-16) (aged 57) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Occupation	Poet
Notable work(s)	"[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]", "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]", "An Horatian Ode"

Andrew Marvell (31
March 1621 – 16 August 1678) was an [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

Marvell was born in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
East Riding of
Yorkshire, near the city of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
The family moved to Hull when his father was
appointed Lecturer at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] 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, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], An [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] Ode
upon [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]'s Return from Ireland, and the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

Early life

At the age of twelve, Marvell
attended Trinity
College, Cambridge and eventually received his BA degree.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Afterwards, from the middle of 1642 onwards, Marvell probably travelled in
continental Europe. He may well have served as
a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] for an aristocrat on
the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]; 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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in 1645 and Milton later
reported that Marvell had mastered four [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
including [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

First poems and Marvell's time at Nun Appleton

Marvell's first poems, which
were written in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
and published when he was still at Cambridge, lamented a visitation of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and celebrated the birth of a child to King
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and Queen [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. 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.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Circa 1650-52, Marvell served
as tutor to the daughter of the Lord General [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], who had
recently relinquished command of the Parliamentary
army to Cromwell. He lived during that time at Nun Appleton House, near [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], 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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

Anglo-Dutch War and employment as Latin secretary

During the period of
increasing tensions leading up to the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
of 1653, Marvell wrote the satirical "Character of Holland,"
repeating the then current [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Oxenbridge had made two trips to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], 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
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

In 1657, Marvell joined
Milton, who by that time had lost his sight, in service as Latin secretary to
Cromwell's [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] at a salary of £200 a
year, which represented financial security at that time. In 1659 he was elected
to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] from his birthplace of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], 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.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

A
statue of Andrew Marvell, located in the Marketplace, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Oliver Cromwell died in 1658.
He was succeeded as Lord Protector by his son [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
but in 1660 the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
while he helped convince the government of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] 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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
According to a biographer:

“

Skilled in the arts of
self-preservation, he was not a toady.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

”

Marvell took up opposition to
the 'court party', and satirised them anonymously. In his longest verse [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], 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, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
himself a government official, commented in his [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], "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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] agent for the Hull Trinity
House, a shipmasters' [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
He went on two missions to the continent, one to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and the other
encompassing [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

Prose works

Marvell also wrote anonymous [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] criticizing
the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], defending [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] dissenters, and
denouncing [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

The Rehearsal Transpros'd,
an attack on [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], was published in two
parts in 1672 and 1673.

In 1676, Mr. Smirke; or
The Divine in Mode, a work critical of intolerance within the Church of
England, was published together with a "Short Historical Essay, concerning
General Councils, Creeds, and Impositions, in matters of Religion."

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...^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

”

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] described it as "one of the
most influential pamphlets of the decade"^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
called it: "A fine pamphlet, which throws light on causes provocative of
the formation of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

A 1678 work published
anonymously ("by a Protestant") in defense of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] against the attack of his
fellow-dissenter, the severe Calvinist [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], is also probably
by Marvell. Its full title is Remarks upon a late disingenuous discourse, writ
by one T.D. under the pretence de causa Dei, and of answering Mr. John Howe's
letter and postscript of God's prescience, &c., affirming, as the
Protestant docrine, that GOd doth by efficacious influence universally move and
determine men to all their actions, even to those that are most wicked.