Why was andrew marvell famous

Academy of American Poets. Andrew Marvell. New York and London: W. In he served with the British minister in Holland; in 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. 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 s; few of them are without central images of gardens. 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. The most authoritative biography of Marvell is in French. Sackville-West, Andrew Marvell Keast, ed. The seminal essay by T.

Most of Ruth C. Wallerstein's Studies in Seventeenth-century Poetic is devoted to Marvell. His very public position—in a time of tremendous political turmoil and upheaval—almost certainly led Marvell away from publication. No faction escaped Marvell's satirical eye; he criticized and lampooned both the court and Parliament.

Indeed, had they been published during his lifetime, many of Marvell's more famous poems—in particular, "Tom May's Death," an attack on the famous Cromwellian—would have made him rather unpopular with royalists and republicans alike.

Marvell used his political status to free Milton, who was jailed during the Restoration, and quite possibly saved the elder poet's life. In the early years of his tenure, Marvell made two extraordinary diplomatic journeys: to Holland and to Russia, Sweden, and Denmark In , after 18 years in Parliament, Marvell died rather suddenly of a fever. Gossip of the time suggested that the Jesuits a target of Marvell's satire had poisoned him.

After his death he was remembered as a fierce and loyal patriot. Now considered one of the greatest poets of the seventeenth century, Marvell published very little of his scathing political satire and complex lyric verse in his lifetime. Although he published a handful of poems in anthologies, a collection of his work did not appear until , three years after his death, when his nephew compiled and found a publisher for Miscellaneous Poems.

The circumstances surrounding the publication of the volume aroused some suspicion: a person named "Mary Marvell," who claimed to be Marvell's wife, wrote the preface to the book.

Her ruse, of course, merely contributes to the mystery that surrounds the life of this great poet. Marvell died on August 16, He was educated National Poetry Month.

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