Poems On Affairs Of State

Deep conflicts in Restoration England produced a torrent of satirical verse on the policies, manners, and morals of Charles II and his age. Almost every poet—impelled by motives ranging from venality to patriotism—took his turn at satirizing the establishment. These Poems on Affairs of State, as they came to be known, provide an inexhaustible and minute record of the times from every point of view. The first volume of the Yale Edition includes the most important pieces, published and unpublished, dealing with events from the restoration of Charles to the outbreak of the Popist Plot in 1678. It is fully annotated and illustrated from contemporary materials. George deForest Lord, associate professor of English at Yale University and Master of Trumbull College, is general editor of the series as well as editor of this first volume.

Andrew Marvell is one of the greatest English lyric poets of the seventeenth century and one of its leading polemicists. This Companion brings a set of fresh questions and perspectives to bear on the varied career and diverse writings of a remarkable writer and elusive man. Drawing on important new editions of Marvell's poetry and of his prose, scholars of both history and literature examine Marvell's work in the contexts of Restoration politics and religion, and of the seventeenth-century publishing world in both manuscript and print. The essays, individually and collectively, address Marvell within his literary and cultural traditions and communities; his almost prescient sense of the economy and ecology of the country; his interest in visual arts and architecture; his opaque political and spiritual identities; his manners in controversy and polemic; the character of his erotic and transgressive imagination and his biography, still full of intriguing gaps.