Andrew marvell (1621-1678)

The facts of Marvell's life present a deceptively sta­ble and unspectacular background for his subtle, enigmatic poetry. The son of a Puritan clergyman from the north of England, Marvell attended Hull Grammar School and then went on to Cambridge University. After graduating in 1638, he traveled in Europe for a number of years before returning to England. Around 1650 he took a position as tutor to the daughter of Sir Thomas Fairfax, Lord-General of Oliver Cromwell's Parliamentary army. Marvell was highly skilled in the classical lan­guages, and in 1657 he was made an assistant to John Milton, Latin Secretary for the Puritan Com­monwealth (Milton composed official government documents in the formal Latin still required in the seventeenth century). The idea of Marvell as Mil­ton's assistant is richly suggestive, for their poetry is in many respects complementary. Themes that Milton takes up in his bold, uncompromising grand manner are touched upon in Marvell's poetry with a cool, sophisticated indirectness. After the Restoration, when Milton was faced with impris­onment and perhaps even execution, Marvell seems to have been instrumental in working be­hind the scenes to secure the great poet's freedom. In 1659 Marvell was elected Member of Parliament for his home town of Hull, which he continued to represent until his death in 1678. Although usually grouped with the metaphys­ical poets, Marvell stands apart from Donne and his followers in some respects. His tone, which is often light, witty, and even playful, links him with the Cavalier poets. Metrically, he prefers the grace­ful swing of the four-beat line in couplet and qua­train to the uneven cadence and irregular stanza of the metaphysicals. Yet there is great depth in Mar­vell's poetry. Marvell has a wonderful way of pre­senting extraordinary experiences from more than one perspective, and of making us see the strangeness in experiences so familiar that we are likely to take them for granted. His attitude is that of a poised and curious observer whose seriousness is mixed with a delight in the play of his own mind.

All of Marvell's lyric poems were written by the early 1650's, although they were not published until 1681, when they seemed old-fashioned and out-of-date. After the Commonwealth period, Mar­vell turned to prose and satire. He, like Donne, was largely forgotten during the eighteenth century. Again, it was, the modern poet T. S. Eliot who helped to revive his reputation. Eliot saw that Mar­vell's wit and magniloquence joined together the two great strands of seventeenth-century poetry.

Ben jonson (1572-1637)

Ben Jonson is the most important dramatist of his age after Shakespeare, as we noted in the general introduction to the Renaissance. His stature as a poet is no less imposing. Even more than Donne, Jonson set an example for later poets that would have a lasting effect throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Unlike most of his followers in the "Tribe of Ben," Jonson did not come from a family of land and wealth. His father, a minister, died when Jon­son was an infant, and he was adopted by a brick­layer. He managed to receive a good secondary edu­cation while growing up in London, but he never attended a university. Much of Jonson's immense learning was acquired through private reading and study. After working for a time as a bricklayer, he entered the army and fought in Flanders on the side of the Dutch Protestants in their struggle for in­dependence from Spain. Returning to London around 1595, he went to work as an actor and play­wright, and he was immediately successful. The major obstacle to his early literary career was a hot temper. He was once jailed for killing a fellow actor in a duel, and throughout his career he was embroiled in bitter literary disputes with other playwrights. Yet Jonson did grow mellower with age and increasing recognition. From 1605 on, Jon­son produced masques for the court of James I — elaborate and expensive allegorical spectacles com­bining music, drama, and dance, and always cul­minating in a compliment to the king or the royal family. In 1616 James appointed Jonson poet laureate and granted him a comfortable pension. His death in 1637, only a few years after Charles I was faced with open rebellion, was mourned as the end of an era.

Jonson's poetry marks the. serious beginning of that movement in English art, literature, and taste which we know as neoclassicism. Earlier Renaissance writers had of course studied the classical Greek and Latin authors, but Jonson made such study a much more systematic basis for his own art. He wrote in all the classical poetic forms ex­cept epic: epigram, satire, verse epistle, epitaph, ode. His lighter lyrics and songs, some of which are represented on pages 254-257, flow with an ease and a purity that come from Jonson's absolute mas­tery of rhythm and sound. They are the finest poems of their kind in English.