The modest ambition of Andrew Marvell

The Modest Ambition of Andrew Marvell deals with the specific historical presences and pressures that led Marvell to devise his defenses of Richard Lovelace, Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Fairfax, and John Milton. It also focuses on the poetic or formal response that Marvell makes to historical fact, not only in the strategies of his language, but also in the perceptible adjustments such strategies signal for his self-appointed role as poet-apologist.

Marvell's evolving notion of his own role as poet is exhibited through his "reformation" of certain images in which an ultimate consistent development emerges that culminates in not just his rejection of what may be called the Edenic impulse, but a denial of its authenticity as such and an endorsement of destined progression.

Both his occasional and thematic poetry may be seen for the most part as a response to the regicide, to the Interregnum, and perhaps most important, to his associations with four major figures of the time - Lovelace, Fairfax, Cromwell, and Milton.