Andrew Marvell: World Enough and Time Book

Ever since T.S. Eliot claimed in 1921 that Andrew Marvell and his poetry "spoke more clearly and unequivocally with the voice of his literary age than does Milton", this most elusive of 17th-century Metaphysical poets has been celebrated as one of the finest in the English language. However, as Nicholas Murray is at pains to point out in his biography World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell, this perception of the author of "To His Coy Mistress" and the "Horatian Ode" is a peculiarly 20th-century impression. Throughout his lifetime and the subsequent centuries Marvell was more generally known as a biting satirist, political pamphleteer, and dedicated Member of Parliament for Hull during one of the most turbulent periods of English political history. Squaring the poet with the politician, Murray comes up with a strangely unattractive figure, an intellectual opportunist and political survivor, who shifted from Royalist to Republican camps in the wake of the Civil War, the execution of Charles I, and the rise of Cromwell, before once more embracing the monarchy in the wake of the Restoration and the reign of Charles II. What emerges is a man who "enjoyed the art of politicking and what would now be called lobbying", to whom poetry came second best to political life, and whose verse "is not a poetry of personality". While Murray battles valiantly with Marvell's intrigues as a scholar, linguist, MP, traveller and spy, and animates his account with stories of Marvell's relations with the embattled Milton and his arch-rival Samuel Parker, the Archbishop of Oxford, the poet hardly leaps off the page. Marvell is so intangible that in his penultimate chapter Murray resorts to asking rather despairingly "Was Andrew Marvell gay?" In focussing on the minutiae of Marvell's political life some may feel that Murray loses sight of the poetry, which is cursorily read through what appear to be rather bland critical binoculars. World Enough and Time is detailed and exhaustive, and will be of interest to Marvell scholars and those interested in the 17th century, but the general reader may find the biographer's prose a little heavy-going. T.S. Eliot called Marvell "a lukewarm partisan". Nicholas Murray's biography presents us with a similarly tepid Marvell. --Jerry BrottonRead More