In 1660, Edmund Waller was an eminent poet whose claims to fame
rivaled those of even his most illustrious predecessors, while Andrew
Marvell has scarcely a reputation at all. Today, however, that situation
is completely reversed. A.B. Chambers's study shows that Waller
has been unjustly neglected in recent times and that, together,
some of the work of Waller and Marvell bridged the gap between the
work of the early seventeenth century and the Restoration. Chambers
suggests that Waller and Marvell are mutually illuminating, that
their poems have substantial intrinsic interest, and that they opened
the door through which Dryden made his entrance to become the dominant
literary figure of the Restoration.
Chambers situates important poems by both authors within historical
and literary contexts as an aid to elucidating both meaning and
poetic achievement, but he also pays close historical attention
to details of language, syntax, and metrics that supply meaning.
He provides a significant new reading of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress,"
while also situating the poem within Marvell's poetic and political
careers. He also presents a fuller, more accurate picture of the
period by taking into account the conceptual and poetic problems
that both authors necessarily confronted and by examining the curiously
inverted parallelism of the strategies that they employed in addressing
those problems.
A.B. Chambers is Professor of English at the University
of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the editor of The Works of John
Dryden, Volume 4 (California, 1974). |
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