The series of which this volume forms part is not a Bradshaw or a Whitaker's Almanack of information; nor has it been designed on the lines of the standard Histories of Literature. It is intended for those many thousands of general readers who accept with genuine respect what is known as our 'literary heritage', but who might none the less hesitate to describe intimately the work of such writers as Pope, George Eliot, Langland, Marvell, Yeats, Tourneur, Hopkins, Crabbe, or D. H. Lawrence, or to fit them into any larger pattern of growth and development.
This book is about the things which could unite, rather than divide, poets during the English Civil Wars: friendship, patronage relations, literary admiration, and anti-clericalism. The central figure is Andrew Marvell, renowned for his "ambivalent" allegiance in the late 1640s. Little is known about Marvell's associations in this period, when many of his best-known lyrics were composed. The London literary circle which formed in 1647 under the patronage of the wealthy royalist Thomas Stanley included "Cavalier" friends of Marvell such as Richard Lovelace but also John Hall, a Parliamentarian propagandist inspired by reading Milton.
English poetry in the first half of the seventeenth century, an outstandingly rich and varied body of verse, can be understood and appreciated more fully when set in its cultural and ideological context. This introductory Companion, consisting of fourteen new introductory essays by scholars of international standing, provides individual studies of Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Milton, Crashaw, Vaughan and Marvell, together with general essays on the political, social context, and the relationship of poetry to the mutations and developments of genre and tradition.
