WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME

It has been over 30 years since the last biography of Metaphysical poet Marvell, and Welsh poet Murray takes full advantage

of the intervening research in his new life of this intensely private yet highly public man. Marvell was a mercurial figure, a tempestuous man in a turbulent age, a poet and pamphleteer, a controversialist and a member of Parliament. Yet even given new information uncovered in the past three decades, little is known about long stretches of his life and career. Indeed, as Murray ruefully admits at one point, we cannot even be entirely sure of the pronunciation of Marvell's surname. Some things are certain, though. Marvell was a Puritan minister's son, born on March 31, 1621, educated at Eton, orphaned at 19 when his father drowned. Because, like so many men of letters of his era, he could not hope to support himself by writing, he found employment, after a period of about four years abroad, as a tutor to the children of the well-to-do. Both before and after his election to Parliament, he wrote verse and, eventually, prose; ironically, his topical prose writings were the mainstay of his reputation throughout his lifetime and for most of the century after his death in 1678. His poetry began to receive something like its current recognition only in the early 19th century. Murray's portrait of Marvell reveals a clever, gifted man who was willing to do whatever was necessary to survive the swift-running currents of the Cromwell era and the Restoration, yet a man of bedrock integrity. The author's analyses of the verse are workmanlike, if uninspired, and his grasp of the complexities of the period is impressive. The result is a solid popular biography of a secretive figure, bedeviled by the clouds of mystery still surrounding its subject.

An intelligent but somewhat stolid life that captures (but is also imprisoned by) its hero’s enigmatic nature.