It took a long time for Marvell's fame as a poet to match, and then to eclipse, his celebrity as a politician and defender of civil liberties, but in the present century he has been regarded as perhaps the most important seventeenth-century poet after his friend John Milton. His poems were published postumously in 1681, and there is important additional material in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The present edition, though drawing on the Oxford English Text edition of Margoliouth as revised by Legouis, offers a new recension of the text and, since the poetry sometimes calls for it, unobtrusive explanatory annotation. Marvell's powers as a prose satirist are represented by the first book of The Rehearsal Transprosed.