Description
Book SynopsisThis 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.
Table of ContentsContents: Introduction; The mower poems; Lovers, gardens, paradise: the nymph and the coy mistress; Lovers, gardens, paradise: Bermudas and The Garden; The religious verse; The royalist poems and An Horatian Ode; Home and homeland in Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax; Conclusion; Select bibliography; Index.
