First Published in 1966, The Art of Marvell's Poetry presents J.B. Leishman’s appreciation of Andrew Marvell’s poems by demonstrating a sensitive understanding of attitudes peculiar to the seventeenth century and to Marvell. Leishman calls Marvell an "inveterate imitator and experimenter". His success depended on originality of combination rather than originality of invention. But while such phrases as "Musick, the Mosaique of the Air,’’ "Desarts of vast Eternity,"- and "a green Thought in a green shade" were certainly inspired by others, they are distinctively and unquestionably Marvell’s own. Marvell’s poetry is shown to be the work of a man living at a certain moment in history; it is poetry which could not have been written at any other time, and its affinities to the work of contemporary poets are clearly demonstrated. The Art of Marvell's Poetry is a must read for scholars and researchers of English poetry, English literature, and European literature.

This monograph studies how, across the Folio of 1681, Marvell's poems engage not merely with different kinds of loss and aspiration, but with experiences of both that were, in mid-seventeenth-century England, disturbingly new and unfamiliar. It particularly examines Marvell's preoccupation with the search for home, and with redefining the homeland, in times of civil upheaval. In doing so it traces his progression from being a poet who plays sophisticatedly with received myth to being one who is a national mythmaker in rivalry with his poetic contemporaries such as Waller and Davenant. Although focusing primarily on poems in the Folio of 1681, this book considers those poems in relation to others from the Marvell canon, including the Latin poems and the satires from the reign of Charles II. It closely considers them as well in relation to verse by poets from the classical past and the European, especially English, present.

A set of specially commissioned essays forming a fresh understanding of the poet within his time and place.

The figure of the woman as hero in pastoral romance is shown to grow in importance and complexity in this important new study. The genre of pastoral romance flourished dramatically in Renaissance England between 1590 and 1650. One of its key elements is that it is the daughter, not the son, of the gentle family who increasingly becomes the subject of theromance's attempt to define and illustrate heroism. The pastoral heroine's task is paradoxical: to break out of her pastoral paradise in order to ensure its reconstitution. She is the princess, the shepherdess, the Lady, or the virtuous daughter who becomes a repository of honor and virtue in a changing society where traditional chivalric definitions of honor hold decreasing purchase. This groundbreaking book examines the typical challenges facedby the pastoral romance heroine as she matures within the pastoral locus amoenus: the foundling dilemma; the loop-shaped quest: the rhetorical battle; the chastity threat; the reconciliation of beauty to virtue; and familial reunification. It illustrates how the allegorical, symbolic, and psychological characterizations of pastoral heroines in the works of Sidney, Spenser, Wroth, Fletcher, Milton, and Marvell anticipate developments in the representation of female subjectivities normally associated with the novel. SUE P. STARKE is Associate Professor of English at Monmouth University, New Jersey.

The Modest Ambition of Andrew Marvell deals with the specific historical presences and pressures that led Marvell to devise his defenses of Richard Lovelace, Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Fairfax, and John Milton. It also focuses on the poetic or formal response that Marvell makes to historical fact, not only in the strategies of his language, but also in the perceptible adjustments such strategies signal for his self-appointed role as poet-apologist.