1st Edition
Andrew Marvell Loss and aspiration, home and homeland in Miscellaneous Poems
This monograph studies how, across the Folio of 1681, Marvell's poems engage not merely with different kinds of loss and aspiration, but with experiences of both that were, in mid-seventeenth-century England, disturbingly new and unfamiliar. It particularly examines Marvell's preoccupation with the search for home, and with redefining the homeland, in times of civil upheaval. In doing so it traces his progression from being a poet who plays sophisticatedly with received myth to being one who is a national mythmaker in rivalry with his poetic contemporaries such as Waller and Davenant. Although focusing primarily on poems in the Folio of 1681, this book considers those poems in relation to others from the Marvell canon, including the Latin poems and the satires from the reign of Charles II. It closely considers them as well in relation to verse by poets from the classical past and the European, especially English, present.
Biography
A. D. Cousins is Professor of English at Macquarie University, Australia.
"A.D. Cousins's monograph on Andrew Marvell's Miscellaneous Poems (1681) makes a fresh and detailed contribution to our understanding of this enigmatic poet's verse. ... Cousins's book is an exemplary complement to this archival plenitude because it delivers a convincing thesis by way of embedding the poems in a dynamic mosaic of literary tropes and traditions reaching from the 1650s back to antiquity." -- Liam E. Semler, The University of Sydney