Andrew Marvell

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Andrew Marvell

Andrew Marvell (born March 31, 1621 in Winestead near Patrington , Holderness , Yorkshire , † August 16, 1678 in London ) was an English poet and politician . Along with John Donne and George Herbert, he is considered one of the most important metaphysical poets ("metaphysical poets").

Life

Marvell was born in 1621 as the son of the Anglican pastor Rev. Andrew Marvell the Elder. Ä. and his wife Anne was born. When he was three years old, the Yorkshire family moved to Hull . From 1633 until the death of his father in 1640 studied Marvell at Trinity College of Cambridge University . In 1637 he published a Greek and a Latin poem in the Musa Cantabrigiensis . After his studies he may have worked in the trading company of his brother-in-law Edmund Popple.

During the English Civil War from 1642 to 1646 he traveled in France, Holland, Switzerland, Spain and Italy, presumably as a companion and private tutor to aristocratic travelers on their Grand Tour . During these stays abroad he probably got to know the continental baroque poetry, in particular the poetry of the French poètes libertins such as Théophile de Viau or Marc-Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant , whose praising nature as a place of retreat or regeneration for reflective consciousness (Solitude poetry) is quite similar in nature to his own natural poetry .

After his return he was from 1650 tutor to the twelve-year-old Mary Fairfax, the daughter of the former army leader Thomas Fairfax , who had recently refused to take part in a punitive military expedition against loyal forces in Scotland and was replaced in the post of Commander-in-Chief by Oliver Cromwell . In 1650, Marvell published his Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland , which celebrates Cromwell, returning from a bloody punitive expedition from Ireland, as an ancient hero, as it were, above all time. In 1653, Marvell was recommended for government office by John Milton , but that recommendation was unsuccessful. Marvell then became the tutor of Cromwell's ward William Dutton at Eton . In 1655, Marvell published another hymn of praise to Cromwell, The First Anniversary of the Government Under His Highness The Lord Protector .

1657 Marvell was under Secretary of State and intelligence chief John Thurloe assistant to the blind John Milton, who was a "Latin secretary" secretary for foreign language affairs and chief propagandist in Cromwell's State Council. In 1658 Marvell's poem on the death of Cromwell, A Poem upon the Death of His late Highnesse the Lord Protector, appeared .

During the reign of Cromwell's unsuccessful successor, Richard Cromwell , Marvell was elected to the House of Commons in 1659 as a member of his hometown Hull. After the monarchy was restored in 1660, he knew how to avoid any punishment for his cooperation with the Republican Puritans. It is also thanks to him that John Milton was not executed as a punishment for his anti-monarchist writings and revolutionary acts. Marvell is said to have prevented this demand by the new government through his intercession with King Charles II . Marvell contributed an introductory poem to the second edition of Milton's Paradise Lost in 1674.

Marvell was an active politician, he answered letters from the citizens of his constituency and traveled with the Earl of Carlisle on a diplomatic mission to Russia, Sweden and Denmark. In prose satires, which appeared anonymously, he criticized the monarchy, defended puritanically minded oppositionists and spoke out against censorship. One of his opponents in the church political debates of the time was the theologian Samuel Parker . In 1678, Marvell probably died of tertian malaria and was buried in the Church of Saint-Giles-in-the-Fields in London.

Lyric work

The collected poems of Marvell appeared posthumously in 1681. Much of his more important poems, in which he tries to combine the secular with the spiritual view of things, was written between 1650 and 1652, when he was the tutor of Mary Fairfax on her estate in Appleton House in Yorkshire.

Marvell is regarded as one of the last metaphysical poets ; however, his lyric work reveals influences from both Ben Jonson and John Donne, and his later political poems show his closeness to the classicist satirist John Dryden . His Honor ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland (1650) is considered a masterful historical-philosophical interpretation of the political disputes or disputes of his time.

Not least through the civil war experience, he developed a particularly sensitized, lively feeling for nature. The span of his lyrical-meditative transformation of the nature he thoroughly enjoyed sensually can be seen, for example, in a comparison of his two great garden poems. In both poems the garden is celebrated as a premonition of paradise in a fallen world. In contrast to the French models, nature is declared to be a shelter from the simulations of Eros . The looking ego is led through the stages of the physical and mental-imaginative to the emotional ecstasy. In this way Marvell gives the apparently epicurean theme a deeper spiritual dimension. Analogous to his famous love invitation To His Coy Mistress , there is a tension between hedonism and asceticism .

Marvel's garden and landscape poems thus combine in a characteristic form the vividness and clarity of the images of nature in the tradition of Jonson or his pupils with the speculative art of argumentation by John Donne.

Marvell's spiritual poems, on the other hand, always draw the rejected joys of the world anew in the most dazzling colors.

As a homage to Lord Fairfax, Upon Appleton House, with its almost 800 verses, stands in the tradition of country house poems ; In the leisurely progress from the house over the garden into the open landscape, the solemn idea of ​​spiritual freedom in the natural space of order is combined with social ties. This poem is considered one of the most original poems in English-language poetry by critics.

In this lyric poetry, pastoral innocence gains its special luminosity from the experience of a fallen world, while in poems such as The Nymph Complaining the Death of Her Fawn or The Picture of the Little TC in a Prospect of Flowers the specifically feminine eroticism of innocence on the threshold or is praised in advance of the experience.

One of the most well-known, critically valued and historically most significant metaphysical carpe diem poems of Marvel is above all his work To His Coy Mistress, which was probably written in the early 1650s . Although the exact date of origin of this poem can no longer be determined with sufficient certainty, it is considered to be formative and exemplary for the development of the entire metaphysical poetry. This poem is occasionally understood by younger critics as an ironic statement by Marvell on the entire subject of sexuality and seduction in metaphysical poetry, also due to its complex and contradictingly interpretable metaphor, which repeatedly irionically breaks the openly perceived, actual conceptual statement.

Works

Poems

  • The First Anniversary of the Government Under His Highness the Lord Protector. 1655.
  • The Character of Holland. 1665.
  • Clarendon's House Warming. 1667.
  • Dialogue Between Two Horses. 1675.
  • Advice to a painter. 1678.
  • Miscellaneous poems. 1681.
  • A Collection of Poems on Affairs of State. 1689.
  • To his coy mistress. 1681.

prose

  • The Rehearsal Transpros'd. 1672.
  • Mr. Smirke. 1676.
  • An Account of the Growth of Popery, and Arbitrary Government in England. 1678.
  • Remarks Upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse. 1678.

literature

  • Elizabeth Story Donno (Ed.): Andrew Marvell: The Critical Heritage. Routledge Kegan, London 1978, ISBN 0-7100-8791-8 (Reprinted: Routledge, London 1995, ISBN 0-415-13414-5 ).
  • John Dixon Hunt: Andrew Marvell: His Life and Writings. Cornell University Press, Cornell (New York) 1978, ISBN 0-8014-1202-1 .
  • Michael Craze: The Life and Lyrics of Andrew Marvell. Macmillan, London 1979, ISBN 0-333-26250-6 .
  • Patsy Griffin: The Modest Ambition of Andrew Marvell. A study of Marvell and his relation to Lovelace, Fairfax, Cromwell, and Milton. University of Delaware Press, Newark 1995, ISBN 0-87413-561-3 .
  • Robert H. Ray (Ed.): To Andrew Marvell Companion. Garland, New York 1998, ISBN 0-8240-6248-5 .
  • Nicholas Murray: World Enough and Time. The Life of Andrew Marvell. Little, Brown, London 1999, ISBN 0-316-64863-9 (US edition: St. Martin's Press, New York 2000, ISBN 0-312-24277-8 ).
  • Nigel Smith: Andrew Marvell: the chameleon. Yale Univ. Press, New Haven [et al. a.] 2010, ISBN 978-0-300-11221-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Werner von Koppenfels : Marvell, Andrew . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 3-476-02125-4 , p. 385.
  2. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 271 f. See also Werner von Koppenfels : Marvell, Andrew . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 3-476-02125-4 , p. 385f.
  3. ↑ Cf. Werner von Koppenfels : Marvell, Andrew . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 3-476-02125-4 , p. 385f.
  4. ↑ See for the fundamental meaning z. B. Michelle Lee: "To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell." In: Poetry Criticism . Detroit: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2008, pp. 171-282. See also To His Coy Mistress - Cummings Study Guide , accessed October 10, 2010. For the interpretative approaches in the more recent criticism, see, for example, James E. Person: "Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)." In: Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986, pp. 391-451.
personal data
SURNAME Marvell, Andrew
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English poet and politician
DATE OF BIRTH March 31, 1621
PLACE OF BIRTH Winestead , Holderness , Yorkshire
DATE OF DEATH August 16, 1678
Place of death London