The Art of Marvell's Poetry
Description:... "When J.B. Leishman died in August 1963 this book, the result of several years' work, was almost finished. Four chapters were in their final draft and the task of editing the remaining two fell to his friend and Literary Executor, Professor John Butt, who has written the Preface. Leishman calls Marvell an 'inveterate imitator and experimenter'. His success depended on originality of invention. 'He could not have written his poetry if his immediate predecessors had not already written theirs.' But his success was no less triumphant. Such ringing phrases as 'Musick, the Mosaique of the Air', 'Desarts of vast Eternity' and 'a green Thought in a green shade' were certainly inspired by others, but they are distinctively and unquestionably Marvell's own. And if Marvell depended on the turbulence of his time: the 'Horatian Ode' is a cool acceptance of political violence, 'Appleton House' a hankering to escape from it. To all such questions and to his appreciation of each poem J.B. Leishman brings both an acute study of the text and a sensitive understanding of attitudes peculiar ty the seventeenth century and to Marvell."- John Butt.
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