The man who wrote To His Coy Mistress

As Austen notes in this week’s discovering poetry blog, Andrew Marvell was highly political. The eroticism of To His Coy Mistress is anomaly in a largely political canon, founded in a political life. Marvell was a professional protégé of Milton, Secretary to the Republic, and he was a potent though anonymous critic of the Restoration monarchy; his longest poem, Last Instructions to a Painter (1667), is a satire on fetid Caroline corruption, which he perceived to be polluting the body politic.   

His political career began in the autumn of 1650, when he began to tutor the daughter of Sir Thomas Fairfax. Fairfax was the former commander-in-chief of the New Model Army and a man more esteemed than Cromwell at the time: he had been the victor of Marston Moor and Naseby, not Cromwell. However, even then, Cromwell was the chief of some men. The Horatian Ode was written on his triumphant return from Ireland in the spring of 1650 and the reception was not uniformly rapturous.