- Hardcover: 304 pages
- Publisher: Little, Brown & Company; 1st Edition edition (2 Sep 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0316648639
- ISBN-13: 978-0316648639
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.8 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,546,428 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Ever since T.S. Eliot claimed in 1921 that Andrew Marvell and his poetry "spoke more clearly and unequivocally with the voice of his literary age than does Milton", this most elusive of 17th-century Metaphysical poets has been celebrated as one of the finest in the English language. However, as Nicholas Murray is at pains to point out in his biography World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell, this perception of the author of "To His Coy Mistress" and the "Horatian Ode" is a peculiarly 20th-century impression. Throughout his lifetime and the subsequent centuries Marvell was more generally known as a biting satirist, political pamphleteer, and dedicated Member of Parliament for Hull during one of the most turbulent periods of English political history.
Squaring the poet with the politician, Murray comes up with a strangely unattractive figure, an intellectual opportunist and political survivor, who shifted from Royalist to Republican camps in the wake of the Civil War, the execution of Charles I, and the rise of Cromwell, before once more embracing the monarchy in the wake of the Restoration and the reign of Charles II. What emerges is a man who "enjoyed the art of politicking and what would now be called lobbying", to whom poetry came second best to political life, and whose verse "is not a poetry of personality". While Murray battles valiantly with Marvell's intrigues as a scholar, linguist, MP, traveller and spy, and animates his account with stories of Marvell's relations with the embattled Milton and his arch-rival Samuel Parker, the Archbishop of Oxford, the poet hardly leaps off the page. Marvell is so intangible that in his penultimate chapter Murray resorts to asking rather despairingly "Was Andrew Marvell gay?" In focussing on the minutiae of Marvell's political life some may feel that Murray loses sight of the poetry, which is cursorily read through what appear to be rather bland critical binoculars. World Enough and Time is detailed and exhaustive, and will be of interest to Marvell scholars and those interested in the 17th century, but the general reader may find the biographer's prose a little heavy-going. T.S. Eliot called Marvell "a lukewarm partisan". Nicholas Murray's biography presents us with a similarly tepid Marvell. --Jerry Brotton
SPECTATOR
* 'Timely and comprehensive...Murray brings a much needed and informed freshness of insight'
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The rating should really be 3.5.
This is a scholarly, generally quite comprehensive account of one of the 17th century's finest and most diverse poets. Murray is good at giving detail as to how we know what we know about Marvell and explaining the problems with sources and contemporary accounts. This might be a little mind-boggling and seem pointless to the ordinary reader, however, so beware - this is definitely a book based on facts and not a gripping 'story' of Marvell's life and times.
Nevertheless, the prose is readable if dense with information and I found Murray's style likable enough.
The main problem is that this biography is a bit uneven. There are a few short investigations of his actual poetry but these are few and tend to scratch the surface so that the reader is left wondering what the point of beginning was. Occasionally poetry is used to illustrate a point about Marvell's life but this is so unevenly done that it feels messy. It may have been better to exclude any real detail on the poetry or (preferably) to write a biography more heavily engaged with the actual work of this man who was equally poet and man of his times.
This is a scholarly, generally quite comprehensive account of one of the 17th century's finest and most diverse poets. Murray is good at giving detail as to how we know what we know about Marvell and explaining the problems with sources and contemporary accounts. This might be a little mind-boggling and seem pointless to the ordinary reader, however, so beware - this is definitely a book based on facts and not a gripping 'story' of Marvell's life and times.
Nevertheless, the prose is readable if dense with information and I found Murray's style likable enough.
The main problem is that this biography is a bit uneven. There are a few short investigations of his actual poetry but these are few and tend to scratch the surface so that the reader is left wondering what the point of beginning was. Occasionally poetry is used to illustrate a point about Marvell's life but this is so unevenly done that it feels messy. It may have been better to exclude any real detail on the poetry or (preferably) to write a biography more heavily engaged with the actual work of this man who was equally poet and man of his times.
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