The MagazinePuritan in VerseThe poet-politician of the English Civil War gets his due.Apr 25, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 31
• By BARTON SWAIM
 Andrew Marvell  Andrew Marvell Popperfoto / Getty Images The Chameleon by Nigel Smith Yale, 416 pp., $45 When Andrew Marvell died in 1678, he wasn’t thought of as a great poet, or indeed a poet of any caliber at all. He was known as an industrious member of Parliament and as a talented pamphleteer—author, among other works, of The Rehearsal Transpros’d, a witheringly funny attack on the Erastian and anti-Puritan cleric Samuel Parker, and An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England, a work that generated precisely the kind of alarm its author thought the times warranted. Most of Marvell’s poems were not published until 1681, three years after his death, when his housekeeper, Mary Palmer, brought out a collection titled Miscellaneous Poems in which she described herself as having been Marvell’s wife, a claim that remains unrefuted but highly doubtful. Eighteenth-century Whigs revered him as a defender of political liberty, but only appreciated him as a poet. In fact, well over two centuries would pass before Marvell would become anything more than an interesting second-tier lyricist. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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