The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics)

some of my favorite poems are here

A Marvell is a marvell. I spent several years of my life on this book, and of course his delightful prose satires mostly of clerics, such as his Rehearsal Transpros'd, and I have never regretted a minute of it. The book I wrote on him, This Critical Age: Deliberate Departures from Literary Conventionsin Seventeenth Century English Poetry, was published by the U MI doctorate mill. It's in one German library, at the University where Pope Benedict XVI once taught and administered. I cannot claim he ordered it, but...Directing my thesis was the delightful Leonard Unger (U MN), who with his friend Saul Bellow once composed, over lunch, a translation of the first four lines of Eliot's Wasteland--into Yiddish. Leonard had an expansive mind, and broadened my studies of Marvell into comparative European literature-- since Marvell tutored languages to Lord General Fairfax's daughter. They lived near Hull at Appleton House, after Fairfax retired as head of Cromwell's army at age 33, because of his refusal to participate in the trial of Charles I; when Fairfax's name was read in Westminster Hall, a voice called out, "He has too much sense to be here." This caused a mini-riot; it was his wife's voice, Anne Vere's. The following day, someone tried the same thing, and was branded.In his "Garden," Marvell writes perhaps the best lines in all lit on the human mind, especially in the midst of nature, "The Mind, that Ocean where each kind/ Does streight its own resemblance find,/ Yet it creates, transcending these,/ Far other Worlds, and other Seas,/ Annihilating all that's made/ To a green Thought, in a green Shade." His environmentalist lines in the same poem criticize Fond lovers' carving names in trees. "Fair trees! where s'eer your barkes I wound/ No names shall but your own be found." He puts this into practice in his Latin version of the same poem, "Hortus." He says he will carve "nullla Naera, or Chloe, but Plane tree and Elm, Plantanus ...Ulmus.Marvell had a marvelous ear, so that even in his funny prose satirizing the bishops (whom, like Milton, he generally opposed) he writes with amusing alliteration, on Archbishop Parker's sexual peccadilloes, "The sympathy of silk brought tippet to petticoat, and petticoat to tippet."My study emphasizes that all of Marvell's poems are criticism of other poems, in verse. Many of them critique the pastoral convention then so prevalent, like "Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers," and "The Garden." His most famous poem, "To his Coy Mistress," unprecedented and unreiterated in his canon, critiques Carpe Diem poems, including many sonnets. (Shakespeare's "My Mistress' Eyes" also critiques sonnet conventions, as do a a few of Sidney's sonnets.) In fact, English poets until Dryden usually included criticism of other poems--Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, Carew, Suckling, Cleveland. After Dryden, criticism became a prose landscape. Too bad. With this loss, poetry became famously non-analytical. But why? Many Renaissance poems discourse on natural philosophy, what we call "science." Cowley in English, Giordano Bruno in Latin. (My last two books are on G Bruno.)

Like all the Penquin Classics, this paperback edition of all of Andrew Marvell's poems is attractive, well-bound, and uses a nice, decent-sized, very readable font.Though the "mower poems" and To His Coy Mistress contain some of the most beautiful lines in all poetry, so much of Marvell's work consists of lengthy, politically themed poems that are usually centered on some event that was occurring during the poet's life. It's a real pity he did not write more of the shorter, lyrical poems that he excelled at. Two poems, "The Mower Against Gardens" and "The Garden" are among my favorites. One enumerates the many delights of having a garden; the other notes that gardens are not as beautiful as natural wildflower meadows where everything grows in delightful chaos, and admonishes gardeners for taking tropical plants and transplanting them in cold, alien environments. The handful of incomparable poems in this volume make it a collection worth having. And if you also enjoy the political poems, it's great having all the poems in one book.

I have used this edition of Marvell's poems for many years in teaching. I also once wrote a brief article about a mistake in it, but for the most part consider the edition very satisfactory. The appearance of *Andrew Marvell: Pastoral and Lyric Poems 1681* (University of Western Australian Press, 2000) has led me to re-appraise Donno's work. The UWA edition is really a selection, and its text is less good than Donno's, though it offers far more - and very rewarding - annotation. This should be of help for specialised work. But Donno offers perfectly adequate help to the average student; she presents ALL of the poems, and she does so in a responsibly modernised, clear text. This continues to be the edition which most academic teachers will want to prescribe, and it is of significance to scholars, too. - Joost Daalder, Professor of English, Flinders University (South Australia)

Muito lirismo...

Bought as a gift. Very well received.

After 35 years it is just so fantastic to have in my possession once more a copy of the complete poems of Andrew Marvell to read whenever I wish to.

Lovely!!!!

Good