Spenserian Poetics

Platonic concerns and conceptions profoundly affected early modern English and continental poetics, yet the effects have had little attention. This book defines Platonism's roles in early modern theories of literature, then reappraise the Platonizing major poet Edmund Spenser. It makes important new contributions to the knowledge of early modern European poetics and advances our understanding of Spenser's role and significance in English literary history. Literary Platonism energized pursuits of the sublime, and knowledge of this approach to poetry yields cogent new understandings of Spenser's poetics, his principal texts, his poetic vocation, and his cultural influence. By combining Christian resources with doctrines of Platonic poetics such as the poet's and lover's inspirational furies, the revelatory significance of beauty, and the importance of imitating exalted ideals rather than the world, he sought to attain a visionary sublimity that would ensure his enduring national significance, and he thereby became a seminal figure in the English literary "line of vision" including Milton and Blake among others. Although readings of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender typically bypass Plato's Phaedrus, this text deeply informs the Calender's treatments of beauty, inspiration, poetry's psychagogic power, and its national responsibilities. In The Faerie Queene, both heroism and visionary poetics arise from the stimuli of love and beauty conceived Platonically, and idealized mimesis produces its faeryland. Faery's queen, projected from Elizabeth I as in Platonic idealization of the beloved, not only pertains to temporal governance but also points toward the transcendental Ideas and divinity. Whereas Plato's Republic valorizes philosophy for bringing enlightenment to counter society's illusions, Spenser champions the learned and enraptured poetic imagination, and proceeds as such a philosopher-poet.

The author's predecessors focus almost exclusively on the Metamorphoses as intertext, but do not often distinguish between early modern Latin editions of the poem and translations such as Arthur Golding's. Although Spenser read Ovid in his native language, during the quarter-century of his writing career, his countrymen such as Shakespeare, Donne, and Lodge imitate and recast the ancient author. During this English aetas Ovidiana, a translation industry arises simultaneously so that the entire corpus is rendered into English, from Golding's Metamorphoses (1567) to Wye Saltonstall's Ex Ponto (1638). Since the sixteenth century did not often read or hear a Roman poet in prose renditions, the author uses Renaissance poetical verse translations (with the Latin text) to explore Spenser's variegated use of Ovid: how he sounded as early modern English poetry.

Carol V. Kaske examines how the form, no less than the theology, of Spenser's writings reveals the influence of the Bible and medieval and Renaissance Biblical hermeneutics. Her approach partakes of both the old historicism and the new. Spenser and Biblical Poetics is the first comprehensive account of the contradictions and inconsistencies in Spenser's imagery—particularly in The Faerie Queene. These and his well-known contradictions in doctrine Kaske accepts and celebrates. She shows that Spenser challenges the reader with problems arising from his endorsement of both Protestant and Catholic traditions. She connects Spenser's contradictory style not only with such religious topics (for example, adiaphorism) but also with secular ones such as colonialism, the conflict between nature and culture, and the policies of the Queen. Spenser and Biblical Poetics makes an indispensable contribution to the history of reading in the Renaissance.

The Shepheardes Calender (1579) signalled Spenser's desire to assume the role of an English Virgil and at the same time his readiness to leave behind the pastoral world of his apprenticeship and his early persona, Colin Clout. Yet Spenser was twice to return to the pastoral world of Colin Clout, first in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (written 1591, published 1595), and then again in the sixth and last complete book of The Faerie Queene. In Spenser and the Poetics of Pastoral, David Shore considers the structure of the moral eclogues of the Calender as it defines the pastoral vision that informs and unifies the entire poem. He then examines the themes of poetic idealism and courtly corruption in Colin Clout and sees in their confrontation Spenser's questioning of the public foundations of the poet's heroic endeavour. Finally, he considers Calidore's pastoral retreat in The Faerie Queene and finds in it support for the argument that Spenser's greatest poem is essentially complete. Pastoral is a highly self-conscious genre, especially in Spenser's explorations of the imaginative world of Colin Clout. By bringing together Spenser's three versions of that world, Spenser and the Poetics of Pastoral contributes to a richer appreciation of the pastoral works themselves and to a better understanding of the shape of Spenser's literary career as a whole.

Exemplary Spenser analyses the didactic poetics of The Faerie Queene, renewing attention to its avowed attempt to "fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline" and examining how Spenser mobilises his pedagogic concerns through the reading experience of the poem. Grogan's investigation shows how Spenser transacts the public life of the nation heuristically, prompting a reflective reading experience that compels engagement with other readers, other texts and other political communities. Negotiating between competing pedagogical traditions, she shows how Spenser's epic challenges the more conservative prevailing impulses of humanist pedagogy to espouse a radical didacticism capable of inventing a more active and responsible reader. To this end, Grogan examines a wide variety of Spenser's techniques and sources, including Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy and the powerful visually-couched epistemological paradigms of early modern culture, ekphrasis among them. Importantly, Grogan examines how Spenser's didactic poetics was crucially shaped by readings of the Greek historian Xenophon's Cyropaedia, a text and influence previously overlooked by critics. Grogan concludes by reading the last book of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of Courtesy, as an attempt to reconcile his own didactic sources and poetics with the more recent tastes of his contemporaries for a courtesy theory less concerned with "vertuous and gentle discipline". Returning to the early modern reading experience, Grogan shows the sophisticated intertextual dexterity that goes into reading Spenser, where Spenserian pedagogy lies not simply in the textual body of the poem, but also in the act of reading it.

Though his writings have long been integral to the canon of early modern English literature, it is only in very recent scholarship that Edmund Spenser has been understood as a preeminent anthropologist whose work develops a complex theory of cultural change. The contributors to this volume approach Spenser’s work from that new perspective, rethinking his contribution as a theorist of culture in light of his poetics. The essays in the collection begin with close readings of Spenser’s writings and end by challenging the ethnographic allegories that shape our knowledge of early modern England. In this book Spenser is proven to be not only a powerful theorist of allegory and poetics but also a profound and subtle ethnographer of England and Ireland. This is an interdisciplinary volume, incorporating studies on history and art history as well as literary criticism. The essays are based on papers presented at The Faerie Queen in the World, 1596-1996: Edmund Spenser among the Disciplines , a conference which took place at the Yale Center for British Art in September 1996.

Introduces a Renaissance masterpiece to a modern audience.