The poetical character,” according to Keats in an 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse, “has no self. . . . It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet.” Keats means to commend the poet’s versatility here, but when Nigel Smith calls Andrew Marvell (1621–78) a chameleon in the subtitle of his new biography, the epithet is more barbed.[1] His contemporaries found him inscrutable. “He was in his conversation very modest, and of very few words. . . . He had not a general acquaintance,” observed John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century antiquarian.

This poet, politician, pamphleteer, and stubbornly private man has been the subject of many critical commentaries but few biographies. The last one before Smith’s was Nicholas Murray’s in 1999 (which I reviewed in the June 2000 New Criterion). Smith is rather supercilious about Murray (“no early modern scholar”) although his own book, while undoubtedly scholarly, is a less lively and engaging read. Since Murray, there has been a new edition of Marvell’s prose, which appeared in 2003, and Smith’s own weighty edition of the poems (2003, revised 2007), from which the notes are taken over verbatim in many parts of the present biography. Smith undoubtedly knows more about Marvell than most people, but, even when he has told us what he knows, it is hard to see the sum of the parts.

Those who knew Marvell personally speak of him as a solitary