The Poems of Andrew Marvell

Contemporary Review, July, 2004

The Poems of Andrew Marvell. Nigel Smith, editor. Pearson Longman. [pounds sterling]50.00. xxv 468 pages. ISBN 0-582-07770-2. This latest number in the well established 'Longman Annotated English Poets' series fully lives up to the high standard set when it began in 1965. The difficulty in publishing the complete works of Marvell is in deciding what were actually his works.

The editor has faced a difficult task and has put dubious works in Appendix I and listed those excluded altogether in Appendix IV. Here we have all Marvell's poems including the eighteen in Latin and the one in Greek. There is an admirable and learned introduction to what must have been a labour of love. As Mr Smith accepts, 'Marvell was a secretive figure'. He also writes that whilst this collection cannot 'claim to be definitive' it can claim to be 'comprehensive' and to make use of the results of some 325 years of scholarship concerning this most eminent of Puritan poets. Marvell was a great poet because he examined the two main problems facing seventeenth-century poets: 'the relationship between amorous or private devotional verse and the different kinds of public verse' and 'the challenge to principle and fixed beliefs that the mutable world of public life and politics offered'. The detailed notes and careful annotations are of a high order and form a scholarship of which any editor and publisher can be justly proud. (P.P.F.)