Andrew Marvell was born on March 31, 1621, in the small village of Winestead in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England, the son of the Reverend Andrew Marvell and Anne Pease Marvell. The family soon moved to the bustling port town of Hull when the elder Marvell was appointed lecturer at Holy Trinity Church and master of the Charterhouse, a charitable institution. Young Andrew grew up amid the sounds of the sea and the…
“There has now for diverse Years, a design been carried on, to change the Lawfull Government of England into an Absolute Tyranny, and to convert the established Protestant Religion into down-right Popery.”
Neighbourhood:
Cavalier Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Political Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder
Edmund Spenser, born about 1552 and dead on 13 January 1599, was the most ambitious English poet of the later Elizabethan age and one of the chief architects of the English literary canon. His achievement rests above all on The Faerie Queene, the vast unfinished romance-epic through which he attempted to give Protestant England a national mythology, a moral education, and a poetic language equal to those of classical…
“The twelve books are twelve adventures or quests, which the twelve several knights undertake, in which they severally represent the twelve several virtues.”
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Irish Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness
