Marvell and Liberty is a collection of original essays by leading scholars which treats this major poet in an entirely new light. Uniquely, it gives equal attention to the full range of Marvell's writings. Marvell is a writer deeply implicated in the history of his time, and as the essays in this volume show, also exercised a potent political influence after his death. Marvell and Liberty constitutes a major reassessment of a figure who lived much of his life close to the epicentre of the revolutionary upheavals of the seventeenth century.

A set of specially commissioned essays forming a fresh understanding of the poet within his time and place.

The Modest Ambition of Andrew Marvell deals with the specific historical presences and pressures that led Marvell to devise his defenses of Richard Lovelace, Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Fairfax, and John Milton. It also focuses on the poetic or formal response that Marvell makes to historical fact, not only in the strategies of his language, but also in the perceptible adjustments such strategies signal for his self-appointed role as poet-apologist.

This volume provides lively and authoritative introductions to twenty-nine of the most important British and Irish poets from Geoffrey Chaucer to Philip Larkin. The list includes, among others, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats and T. S. Eliot, and represents the tradition of English poetry at its best. Each contributor offers a new assessment of a single poet's achievement and importance, with readings of the most important poems. The essays, written by leading experts, are personal responses, written in clear, vivid language, free of academic jargon, and aim to inform, arouse interest, and deepen understanding.

In Milton and the Ends of Time, a team of leading international scholars addresses Milton's treatment of millennial and apocalyptic ideas, topics of major importance in the religious and philosophical thought of his day. The subject has wide-ranging ramifications for the interpretation of Milton's poetry and prose, as his speculations on the ends of time played a vital part in shaping the Miltonic quest and vision. This collection provides a broad range of approaches to Milton, including Milton and the visual arts, Milton's politics and theology, and Milton and science.

Essays on Milton's developing ideas on liberty, and his republicanism, as expressed in his writings over his lifetime.

The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell is the most comprehensive and informative collection of essays ever assembled dealing with the life and writings of the poet and politician Andrew Marvell (1621-78). Like his friend and colleague John Milton, Marvell is now seen as a dominant figure in the literary landscape of the mid-seventeenth century, producing a stunning oeuvre of poetry and prose either side of the Restoration. In the 1640s and 1650s he was the author of hypercanonical lyrics like 'To His Coy Mistress' and 'The Garden' as well as three epoch-defining poems about Oliver Cromwell. After 1660 he virtually invented the verse genre of state satire as well as becoming the most influential prose satirist of the day—in the process forging a long-lived reputation as an incorruptible patriot. Although Marvell himself was an intensely private and self-contained character, whose literary, religious, and political commitments are notoriously difficult to discern, the interdisciplinary contributions by an array of experts in the fields of seventeenth-century literature, history, and politics gathered together in the Handbook constitute a decisive step forward in our understanding of him. They offer a fully-rounded account of his life and writings, individual readings of his key works, considerations of his relations with his major contemporaries, and surveys of his rich and varied afterlives. Informed by the wealth of editorial and biographical work on Marvell that has been produced in the last twenty years, the volume is both a conspectus of the state of the art in Marvell studies and the springboard for future research.

Locating John Milton's works in national and international contexts, and applying a variety of approaches from literary to historical, philosophical, and postcolonial, Milton and Toleration offers a wide-ranging exploration of how Milton's visions of tolerance reveal deeper movements in the history of the imagination. Milton is often enlisted in stories about the rise of toleration: his advocacy of open debate in defending press freedoms, his condemnation of persecution, and his criticism of ecclesiastical and political hierarchies have long been read as milestones on the road to toleration. However, there is also an intolerant Milton, whose defence of religious liberty reached only as far as Protestants. This book of sixteen essays by leading scholars analyses tolerance in Milton's poetry and prose, examining the literary means by which tolerance was questioned, observed, and became an object of meditation. Organized in three parts, 'Revising Whig Accounts,' 'Philosophical Engagements,' 'Poetry and Rhetoric,' the contributors, including leading Milton scholars from the USA, Canada, and the UK, address central toleration issues including heresy, violence, imperialism, republicanism, Catholicism, Islam, church community, liberalism, libertinism, natural law, legal theory, and equity. A pan-European perspective is presented through analysis of Milton's engagement with key figures and radical groups. All of Milton's major works are given an airing, including prose and poetry, and the book suggests that Milton's writings are a significant medium through which to explore the making of modern ideas of tolerance.

Can poetry articulate something about love that philosophy cannot? The Form of Love argues that it can. In close readings of seven “metaphysical” poems, the book shows how poets of the early modern period and beyond use poetic form to turn philosophy to other ends, in order not to represent the truth about love but to create a virtual experience of love, in all its guises. The Form of Love shows how verse creates love that can’t exist without poetry’s specific affordances, and how poems can, in their impossibility, prompt love’s radical re-imagining. Like the philosophies on which they draw, metaphysical poems imagine love as an intense form of non-sovereignty, of giving up control. They even imagine love as a liberating bondage—to a friend, a beloved, a saint, a God, or a garden. Yet these poems create strange, striking versions of such love, made in, rather than through, the devices, structures, and forces where love appears. Tracing how poems think, Kuzner argues, requires an intimate form of reading: close—even too close—attention to and thinking with the text. Showing how poetry thinks of love otherwise than other fields, the book reveals how poetry and philosophy can nevertheless enter into a relation that is itself like love.