The Complete Poems

The wittiest and yet most accessible writing in mid-seventeeth-century England, Andrew Marvell's poetry is both passionate and brillant, erotic and comic, cool courtly and seductive. The friend. admirer and supporter of Milton, Marvell was also a very great poet in his own right. Described by a contemporary as 'of middling stature, pretty strong-set, of roundish face, cherry-cheeked, hazel-eyed, brown-haired he was a man of the people and a brillant intellectual. The fact that he was both a republican and the admired favourite of Charles II indicates the breadth of his sympathies.

Marvell, Andrew (1621--78), was one of the English Metaphysical Poets. Educated at Cambridge, he worked as a clerk, traveled abroad, and returned to serve as tutor to Lord Fairfax's daughter in Yorkshire. In 1657 he was appointed John Milton's assistant in the Latin secretaryship, and in 1659 he was elected to Parliament, where he served until his death. He was one of the chief wits and satirists of his time as well as being a Puritan and a public defender of individual liberty. Today, however, he is known chiefly for his brilliant lyric poetry, which includes The Garden, The Definition of Love, Bermudas, and To His Coy Mistress, and for his Horatian Ode to Cromwell.