If, in 1658, you had been a spectator of the funeral procession of Oliver Cromwell— strictly speaking a memorial procession, the body having been buried two months previously—you could have seen, in the space of a few seconds, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and John Dryden walking past. Has any English monarch had such a distinguished train of mourners as this republican? Milton, the eldest of the trio, was born in 1608, and Dryden, the youngest, did not die until 1700: you would have been looking, all unknowingly, at English poetry in the seventeenth century. Milton had brought out his first collected volume in 1645, and Dryden was just about to make his debut with an elegy on Cromwell. As usual, Marvell (1621–1678) was the dark horse; his collected poems appeared only posthumously, in 1681, and were little known until 1921 when T. S. Eliot wrote an essay marking what he called, in a characteristically deadpan phrase, “the tercentenary of the former member [i.e., Member of Parliament] for Hull.” Marvell scholarship has proceeded apace, in contrast to Marvell biography; Nicholas Murray’s is the first full-length life since that of Pierre Legouis in 1928.[1]The delay is not surprising, for Marvell is not an immediately rewarding subject. He has a habit of disappearing from the record at vital moments, and of keeping silent when he does turn up. He was, wrote John Aubrey, “very modest, and of few words. He had not a general acquaintance.” Personally isolated, he is also