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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Andrew Marvell Biography MARVELL, Andrew (1621–78). An English poet and politician. He was born March 31, 1621, at Winestead, Yorkshire; attended the grammar school at Hull, of which his father became master; graduated B.A. at Trinity College, Cambridge (1638); traveled on the Continent (1642–46); returned to England about 1650; was tutor to Lord Fairfax's daughter Mary; became assistant to Milton in his Latin secretaryship of state (1657); and was elected to Parliament from Hull (1659). From 1663 to 1665 he was secretary to Charles Howard, first Earl of Carlisle, on his embassy to Muscovy, Sweden, and Denmark. Without fortune or influence, possessing no commanding talent as a speaker, he maintained a character for integrity so genuine and high that his constituency felt itself honored by his conduct, and allowed him to the end of his life "a handsome pension." Charles II made fruitless efforts to win him over to the court party. Marvell died Aug. 18, 1678. Marvell was a man of varied talents and of poetic genius. He was a competent man of affairs. As a potent pamphleteer, his reputation was high among his contemporaries, but his controversial writings make little appeal to posterity. His satires have shared much the same fate as his pamphlets, because they are bound up, as lampoons, with incidents and people of his day now forgotten, and partly because their humorous exaggeration, mordant irony, and comic verve cannot atone for artistic failings. In his best poetry Marvell rises, as Lamb well says, "to the highest strains of passion and imagination," abjuring the conceits, the mere fanciful ingenuity, and the witty delicacy which give a certain quaint attraction to his verse, but frequently obscure the meaning. The high-water mark of his poetry is the "Horatian Ode" to Cromwell, but his many and varied lyrics, such as "The Garden," "A Drop of Dew," "To his Coy Mistress," "The Bermudas," and "Young Love," are, of their kind, faultless. His works were published as follows: Miscellaneous Poems (1681); Works (2 vols., 1726), edited by Thomas Cooke; Works, including letters and prose pamphlets (3 vols., 1776), edited by Edward Thompson; Works, including prose works and letters, as well as poems, with annotations, in Fuller Worthies Library, 3 vols. (1872, 1875), edited by Dr. Grosart; Poems and Satires (2 vols., 1892), edited by G. A. Aitken; Poems and Satires (1904), edited by Edward Wright. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XV (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 163. |