Marvell Poems

Having stood for many years in the shadow of Donne, Marvell is now re-emerging as a major poet of the seventeenth century, with an achievement out of proportion to his slender output. Though the sources of the poetry remain mysterious - Marvell is known to history as a man of action, not as a writer - the poems themselves are crystalline, dramatic and impossible to forget. From ‘To His Coy Mistress’ and ‘The Definition of Love’, which everyone learns at school, to the obscure ‘Horatian Ode’, which pays tribute to Cromwell, Marvell is always recognizably the same: laconic, witty and eloquent. This collection contains all Marvell’s major poems, including several translated by the poet himself from his Latin originals.