Marvell and Milton

Warren Chernaik was Emeritus Professor of English at the University of London. He taught at The Ohio State University, The City College of New York and Boston University before moving to the UK and an appointment at Queen Mary College, University of London. His books include Milton and the Burden of Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2017), The Poet's Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge University Press, 1983), The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Cambridge University Press, 2011), The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare's History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

'Warren Chernaik's Marvell and Milton: Poets in a Fallen World is the fruit of a lifetime's reflection on, writing about, and – perhaps especially – teaching of the poetry and prose of the two great seventeenth-century authors. It issues in a series of compelling close readings, sparked by a word like 'fit' in Milton or an otherwise unobtrusive change of tense in a Marvell lyric. While these are worth the price of admission alone, we also get judicious reflections on the scholarly state of the art and a surprising and bracing scepticism about the way Marvell and Milton have been (over-)historicized.' Martin Dzelzainis, Emeritus Professor of Renaissance Literature and Thought, University of Leicester

• 1. Marvel,, Milton, and 'these tumultuous times'; 2. Friends and readers: Donne, Milton, and Marvell; 3. Milton's 'fit audience'; 4. Marvell and the storms of time; 5. Lesser and greater worlds; 6. The rhetoric of defence in Marvell and Milton; 7. Service and servitude in Herbert, Milton, and Marvell; 8. Paradise's only map: Marvell and the fall; 9. Marvell's religious poems: puritanism, Platonism, literary tradition; 10. Religious belief and the politics of conscience: Marvell and Milton; Postscript: 'that happy garden-state'.