To His Coy Mistress To His Coy Mistress "To His Coy Mistress" is a metaphysical poem written by the English author and politician Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) either during or just before the English Interregnum (1649–60). It was published posthumously in 1681. This poem is considered one of Marvell's finest and is possibly the best recognized carpe diem poem in English. Although the date of its composition is not known, it may have been written in the early 1650s. At that time, Marvell was serving as a tutor to the daughter of the retired commander of the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax. The speaker
Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets English poetical biography”. By including them also there is an implied continuity between the volumes to which Johnson contributed and Chalmers’ "work professing to be a Body of the Standard English Poets". Matthew Arnold, in his "Six Chief Lives from Johnson's "Lives of the Poets"" (1878), considered the Lives of Milton, Dryden, Pope, Addison, Swift, and Gray as "points which stand as so many natural centres, and by returning to which we can always find our way again" and also as a model for Arnold's "ideal of liberal education", representing "a crucial century and a half in English literature". For