Marvell's satires won him a reputation in his own day and preserved his memory beyond the eighteenth century as a patriotic political writer—a clever and courageous enemy of court corruption and a defender of religious and political liberty and the rights of Parliament. It was only in the nineteenth century that his lyrical poems began to attract serious attention, and it was not until T. S. Eliot's classic essay (first published in the
Times Literary Supplement, 31 March 1921), marking the tercentenary of Marvell's birth, that Marvell attained recognition as one of the major lyric poets of his age.
In recent years postmodernist theory has once again focused on Marvell as a political writer, but with as much attention to the politics of the lyric poems as in the overtly partisan satires. Doubtless what sustains critical interest in Marvell and accommodates the enormous quantity of interpretive commentary attracted by his work is the extraordinary range and ambiguity of theme and tone among a comparatively small number of poems.
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