Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane

"Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane studies the poetry and polemics of one of the greatest of early modern writers, a poet of immense lyric talent and political importance. The book situates these writings and this writer within the patronage networks and political upheavals of mid seventeenth-century England. Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker track Marvell's negotiations among personalities and events; explores his idealizations, attachments, and subversions, and speculate on the meaning of the narratives that he told of himself within his writings -- what they call his 'imagined life'. Hirst and Zwicker draw the figure of an imagined life from the repeated traces Marvell left of lyric yearning and satiric anger, and suggest how these were rooted bothin the body and in the imagination. The book sheds new light on some of Marvell's most familiar poems -- 'Upon Appleton House', 'The Garden',' To His Coy Mistress', and 'Horatian Ode' -- but at its centre is an extended reading of Marvell's 'The unfortunate Lover', his least familiar and surely most mysterious lyric, and his most sustained narrative of the self. By attending to the lyric, the polemical, and the parliamentary careers together, this book offers a reading, for the first time, of Marvell andhis writings as an interpretable whole."--Publisher's website.

Derek Hirst studied and held his first academic position at Cambridge before moving to Washington University in St Louis in 1975. He has taught (often in tandem with Steven Zwicker) and researched there, and on occasion chaired its History Department, ever since.


Steven Zwicker is Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities at Washington University, and a member of its English Department since 1969; he has held visiting appointments at Doshisha University in Kyoto and at the California Institute of Technology. Over the years, and often together with Derek Hirst, he has taught the literature and cultural history of early modern England.