Introduction

This chapter describes the afterlife and reception of Greville’s poetry from Coleridge and Charles Lamb to the American school of literary criticism around Yvor Winters, arguing how Greville’s reputation for obscurity has tended to circumscribe and limit his appreciation as a poet. In discussing the various genres that comprise Greville’s oeuvre; lyric sequence; political biography; letter of consolation; closet drama and philosophical poem, the editors propose to view Greville’s obscurity as an intellectual resource that arises from the close intersection between political and religious thought and poetic form, which enables a form of philosophical exploration that works through the examination of doubt, contradiction, and paradox, as much as assertion, and which involves the reader in an exercise in critical interpretation.