Andrew Marvell and Cavalier Poetics

Marvell’s relationship to Cavalier poetry has been a significant topic of interest for critics of his work, promising as it does to shed some light on both his place within the genres and styles of mid-seventeenth-century verse and on the complexities of political positioning evident in his earlier work. But Cavalier poetry is itself a complex and non-uniform category, with such complexities evident both in the difficulties of organizing and applying such a label to a group of poets and their work, and in the problems of accommodating significant differences and antagonisms between varying modes of Cavalier writing. In line with this understanding, this chapter explores Marvell’s poetic relationship to his Cavalier contemporaries in a way which recognizes that they can’t easily be comprehended as a fixed point of reference with which to measure Marvell’s own place in the poetic landscape of the time.