Andrew Marvell’s critical stock has never been higher. Long admired for a handful of widely anthologized lyrics, more recent interest in his prose writings has revealed Marvell to be among the most penetrating observers of the debates over liberty and toleration that convulsed the seventeenth century. As a result of this attention Marvell himself has become—along with his friend John Milton—closely identified with the founding of modern liberalism. My concern in this essay however is to interrogate the ways in which Marvell’s politics have been read under the shadow of Milton; and indeed I discover a “Miltonizing” hermeneutic in common between the High-Church controversialists who repudiated Marvell’s tolerationist pamphlet The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672) and modern historians and critics who have sought to write Marvell into the history of English liberty. Without seeking to nullify Marvell’s significant contribution to that history, I argue here that the lyric poet of “inconclusiveness” is more continuous with the Restoration politician than we have thought; and moreover that by taking Marvell’s politics on his own terms we stand to gain valuable perspective on the unstable divisions and contingencies of seventeenth-century political experience.
, second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), the notorious and brilliant libertine poet of King Charles II's court, has long been considered an embodiment of the Restoration era. This interdisciplinary collection of essays by leading scholars focuses new attention on, and brings fresh perspectives to, the writings of Lord Rochester. Particular consideration is given to the political force and social identity of Rochester's work, to the worldscourtly and theatrical, urban and suburbanfrom which Rochester's poetry emerged and which it discloses, and not least to the unsettling aesthetic power of Rochester's writing. The singularity of Rochester's voicehis 'matchless wit'has been widely recognized; this book encourages the continued appreciation of all the ways in which Rochester reveals the layered and promiscuous character of literary projects throughout the whole of a brilliant, abrasive, and miscellaneous age.
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