Andrew Marvell has proven resistant to biography, frustrating even John Aubrey. The subtitle of the most recent account of the poet and parliamentarian’s life, Nigel Smith’s 2010 Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, acknowledges this challenge. In the present study, George Klawitter explores the least understood (and therefore most controversial) aspect of the secretive writer’s identity: his sexuality. Klawitter differentiates his work from Paul Hammond’s canonical 1996 essay, “Marvell’s Sexuality,” by stating in the introduction that he will pursue the subject into the poetry rather than into the pamphlet literature and, through intensive close readings, situate the verse in relation to contemporaneous lyric.

Six chapters comprise the monograph. Chapter 1, “The Heteronormative Paradigm,” concerns Marvell’s attitude toward marriage and opposite-sex coupling. Beginning with the two poems commemorating the 1657 wedding of one of Cromwell’s daughters, Klawitter notes Marvell’s tendency to position himself as an observer instead of a participant in seduction or passion between women and men. The second chapter, on the poet’s indeterminacy of voice, constitutes a formalist interpretation of Marvell’s use of gender-neutral pronouns and double entendre in problem poems such as “Young Love.” In chapter 3, “The Homoerotic Marvell,” Klawitter remarks that the writer feels freest to express erotic attraction to another man—Lord Francis Villiers, Archibald Douglas, the eponymous Unfortunate Lover—when the object of his affection has died a heroic or agonized death, presumably because the same-sex intimacy would appear unmistakable without the pathos. Chapter 4, “Andrew Marvell and Autoeroticism,” sees the poet endorsing self-pleasure and refusing to isolate it from alternative modes of enjoyment, erotic and otherwise. For instance, in “Upon Appleton House,” the tutor stops playing with his “idle utensils,” but only to delight in the vision of Maria Fairfax as his solitude gives way to a more social form of gratification. The fifth chapter, on the sexually abstinate Marvell, is in this reviewer’s view the most important and compelling. Here the author proposes that although Marvell may have been celibate, he assumed different erotic poses in his poems, since he remained uninterested in any one source of sexual pleasure—except, perhaps, voyeurism. The chapter turns on a productive comparison between the bachelorhood of Marvell and that of Robert Herrick. The “romping Royalist” (93) and Episcopal priest celebrates the single life and posits his verses as his progeny; in contrast, his more secular and Puritanical counterpart refrains from commenting on his marital status and from employing the poem-as-offspring motif anywhere in his oeuvre. After such an essay, the concluding chapter, on the devotional Marvell, seems anti-climactic and something of an afterthought, but it is worth perusing for the reading of the liturgical elements in “Bermudas,” however off topic it might be. The volume ends with a tantalizing proposition inviting further study: that the later Marvell perceived himself as married to the state and connected to future generations through his government service.

The book’s strengths lie in the author’s wealth of knowledge about seventeenth-century poetry, extending from classroom favorites, like Rochester and Herrick, to writers who appear less frequently on syllabi, such as Crashaw, Cowley, and Campion. The study is poorer, though, for an introduction that labors to conceptualize same-sex desire in an era before the appearance of homosexuality as an identity and to reconcile literary humanism with more recent methodologies. It would be a pity should its awkwardness discourage readers from discovering the arresting insights of the following chapters, particularly those on autoeroticism and celibacy or asexuality in Marvell’s lyrics. Since the aims and accomplishments of this volume are primarily literary, it will appeal to Marvellians and scholars of the history of poetry, as well as to graduate students and advanced undergraduates researching these subjects.