Andrew Marvell

Nicholas von Maltzahn’s book is that rare accomplishment, an authoritative combination of literary and biographical insight. Career-long scholarship and reflection, lightly worn and crisply deployed, take us inside the imaginative journey of Marvell’s poems and prose while placing them in the cultural, political and religious contexts of his troubled times. It is a richly productive approach which yields so many fresh perceptions as to give us the sense of meeting Marvell anew. - Blair Worden, Emeritus Fellow, St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford
Here is a biography befitting its subject: elegant, compact, and witty. Nobody else has Nicholas von Maltzahn’s command of the Marvell archives. And now he deftly guides us into the world of the poet and polemicist, and into a remarkable mind at once gloomy and humane, taciturn and possessed of peerless verbal acumen. - Feisal G. Mohamed, Professor of English, Yale University, and author of Sovereignty
In this excellent new biography, Nicholas von Maltzahn offers us considerable new insight into the enigma of Milton’s great contemporary, Andrew Marvell. Informed by the latest research, Von Maltzahn is perceptive and nuanced in this admirably lucid inquiry into the evolving relationship between the poet’s life and his writing. The taciturn Marvell who appears here may be a “man of few words,” but his penetrating intelligence renders him vulnerable to a myriad rival impulses – emotional, sexual, and political. As Von Maltzahn’s Marvell struggles to master these impulses and produce the “wiser art” of poems like “The Garden,” his real-life agon does much to explain the irregular baroque quality of his poetry – highly polished but contorted, elaborate, like the agony of his same-sex love as its represented in the “Definition,” begotten “by Despair / Upon Impossibility.” This is a fascinating book and should be read by everyone interested in poetry and the culture of seventeenth-century English life. - Paul Stevens, Professor of English, University of Toronto