New literary life of Andrew Marvell

Dr Matthew Augustine has written a new literary life of the poet and politician Andrew Marvell, now recognised as the most important 17th-century poet after John Milton.

This timely literary biography rebalances critical attention to the two sides of Marvell's identity: the lyric poet and the politician and polemicist. It offers readers a way of seeing the one within the other, of apprehending the politics even of lyrics which celebrate a retreat from politics, and the art of Marvell's public poetry and polemical prose. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, David Wheatley hailed Dr Augustine's book as a 'fine new study', one worthy of a poet at once 'tough and worldly, yet mysterious and mystical'.

Andrew Marvell: A Literary Life is available from Palgrave Macmillan.