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.
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