Andrew Marvell (/ˈmɑːrvəl, mɑːrˈvɛl/; 31 March 1621 – 16 August 1678) was an English metaphysical poet, satirist and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1659 and 1678.

[4] His travel route is unclear, except that Milton later reported that Marvell had mastered four languages, including French, Italian and Spanish.

[5] Marvell's first poems, which were written in Latin and Greek and published when he was still at Cambridge, lamented a visitation of the plague and celebrated the birth of a child to King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria.

His "Horatian Ode", a political poem dated to 1650, responds with sadness to the regicide, despite the overall praise towards Oliver Cromwell's return from Ireland.

He became a tutor to Cromwell's ward, William Dutton, in 1653, and moved to live with his pupil at John Oxenbridge's house in Eton.

[10][11] In 1657, Marvell joined Milton (who was now blind) in service as Latin secretary to Cromwell's Council of State at a salary of £200 a year.

[12] He was paid a rate of 6 shillings, 8 pence per day during sittings of parliament, a financial support derived from the contributions of his constituency.

In his longest verse of satire, Last Instructions to a Painter, written in 1667, Marvell responded to the political corruption that had contributed to English failures during the Second Anglo-Dutch War.

Of another such satire, Samuel Pepys, himself a government official, commented in his diary, "Here I met with a fourth Advice to a Painter upon the coming in of the Dutch and the End of the War, that made my heart ake to read, it being too sharp and so true.

His stay there is now recorded by a bronze plaque that bears the following inscription:Four feet below this spot is the stone step, formerly the entrance to the cottage in which lived Andrew Marvell, poet, wit, and satirist; colleague with John Milton in the foreign or Latin secretaryship during the Commonwealth; and for about twenty years M.P.

His monument, erected by a very grateful constituency, bears the following inscription:Near this place lyeth the body of Andrew Marvell, Esq., a man so endowed by Nature, so improved by Education, Study, and Travel, so consummated by Experience, that, joining the peculiar graces of Wit and Learning, with a singular penetration and strength of judgment; and exercising all these in the whole course of his life, with an unutterable steadiness in the ways of Virtue, he became the ornament and example of his age, beloved by good men, feared by bad, admired by all, though imitated by few; and scarce paralleled by any.

He having served twenty years successfully in Parliament, and that with such Wisdom, Dexterity, and Courage, as becomes a true Patriot, the town of Kingston-upon-Hull, from whence he was deputed to that Assembly, lamenting in his death the public loss, have erected this Monument of their Grief and their Gratitude, 1688.Marvell also wrote anonymous prose satires: criticizing the monarchy and Roman Catholicism, defending Puritan dissenters, and denouncing censorship.

Mr. Smirke; or The Divine in Mode, (1676) criticised Church of England intolerance, and was published together with a "Short Historical Essay, concerning General Councils, Creeds, and Impositions, in matters of Religion."

Marvell's pamphlet An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England, published in late 1677, alleged that: "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".

[21] A 1678 work published anonymously ("by a Protestant") in defense of John Howe against the attack of his fellow-dissenter, the severe Calvinist Thomas Danson, is also probably by Marvell.

He adopted familiar forms and infused them with his unique conceits, analogies, reflections and preoccupations with larger questions about life and death.

Eliot wrote of Marvell's style that "It is more than a technical accomplishment, or the vocabulary and syntax of an epoch; it is, what we have designated tentatively as wit, a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace".

[30] Poets increasingly developed a self-conscious relationship to tradition, which took the form of a new emphasis on craftsmanship of expression and an idiosyncratic freedom in allusions to Classical and Biblical sources.