From: "Jon Corelis" <[log in to unmask]>
<<
P.S. Please someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember reading
that Donne and Marvell, among many other notable poets, never published a
line of verse in their lives.
>>
The answer is "Yes, he did," and "Depends what you mean."
Donne published the two +Anniversaries+ to the memory of Elizabeth Drury in,
I think, 1612 & 13. (google would give the correct dates.) Somewhere he
says, I think to Sir Robert Carr, that it wasn't that he regretted what he
wrote but that he regretted publishing at all. (He needed the money, and
ED's father was his patron.)
Ben Jonson had a low opinion of them -- prophane, and full of blasphemies;
if they had been written to the Virgin Mary, it would have been something.
(In his slightly tipsy +Conversations+ as reported by William Drummond of
Hawthornden.)
Marvell didn't publish any of the poems we associate with him today while he
was alive, but he did publish (anonymously) some anti-monarchist satires in
rhyming iambic couplets. The Rehearsal Transprosed, I think was the title
of one. All the good lyric stuff (written in the 1650s, probably, while he
was working for Fairfax, the Parliamentarian ex-general) was published by
his landlady Mary Powell just after he died, in an attempt to prove she'd
been married to Marvell, who had been entrusted with all the loose cash of a
bankrupt friend not long before. Money again.
Most of the copies lack the engraved picture of Marvell, as people would
tear it out and stick it to the wall, a seventeenth century Che Gueverra
portrait. (He probably wasn't being paranoid when he said that he wouldn't
drink in the company of a man with whom he would not trust his life --
Charles II didn't exactly like him, but as MP for Hull, it would have been
difficult to dispose of him other than quietly.)
<<
(I'm not sure if this applies to their Latin
verses though -- were things like that also circulated mostly in
manuscript?)
>>
I don't think any of the Latin poems by either were printed while they were
alive. Interestingly, two of Marvell's are versions of "The Garden"
("Hortus") and "On A Drop of Dew" ("Ros").
Robin
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