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Puttenham (search for this): chapter 2
alking with such visionary damsels as Ambition and Shamefastness. Nay, even in the most prosy parts, unless my partiality deceive me, there is an infantile confidence in the magical powers of Prosopopoeia which half beguiles us, as of children who play that everything is something else, and are quite satisfied with the transformation. The problem for Spenser was a double one: how to commend poetry at all to a generation which thought it effeminate trifling, See Sidney's Defence, and Puttenham's Art of English Poesy, Book I. c. 8. and how he, Master Edmund Spenser, of imagination all compact, could commend his poetry to Master John Bull, the most practical of mankind in his habitual mood, but at that moment in a passion of religious anxiety about his soul. Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci was not only an irrefragable axiom because a Latin poet had said it, but it exactly met the case in point. He would convince the scorners that poetry might be seriously useful, and
Pindarus (search for this): chapter 2
etti. By her he had four children. He was now at the height of his felicity; by universal acclaim the first poet of his age, and the one obstacle to his material advancement (if obstacle it was) had been put out of the way by the death of Lord Burleigh, August, 1598. In the next month he was recommended in a letter from Queen Elizabeth for the shrievalty of the county of Cork. But alas for Polycrates! In October the wild kerns and gallowglasses rose in no mood for sparing the house of Pindarus. They sacked and burned his castle, from which he with his wife and children barely escaped. Ben Jonson told Drummond that one child perished in the flames. But he was speaking after an interval of twenty-one years, and, of course, from hearsay. Spenser's misery was exaggerated by succeeding poets, who used him to point a moral, and from the shelter of his tomb launched many a shaft of sarcasm at an unappreciative public. Giles Fletcher in his Purple Island (a poem which reminds us o
Aquinas (search for this): chapter 2
ty which no depth of thought, no airiness of fancy, no sincerity of feeling, can singly communicate, but which leaps throbbing at touch of that shaping faculty the imagination. Take Aristotle's ethics, the scholastic philosophy, the theology of Aquinas, the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the small politics of a provincial city of the Middle Ages, mix in at will Grecian, Roman, and Christian mythology, and tell me what chance there is to make an immortal poem of such an incongruous mixture. Cm to his countrymen as the Faery Queen? Undoubtedly Spenser wished to be useful and in the highest vocation of all, that of teacher, and Milton calls him our sage and serious poet, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas. And good Dr. Henry More was of the same mind. I fear he makes his vices so beautiful now and then that we should not be very much afraid of them if we chanced to meet them; for he could not escape from his genius, which, if it led him as phil
Shepherd (search for this): chapter 2
demns the archaisms and provincialisms of the Shepherd's Calendar. He recognized the distinction bety and research. Before the publication of his Shepherd's Calendar in 1579, he had made the acquaintase and ample culture. The publication of his Shepherd's Calendar in 1579 (though the poem itself beumbug among humbugs. The form of Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, it is true, is artificial, absurdany passages in this Epistle? I look upon the Shepherd's Calendar as being no less a conscious and ddies of Milton, a yet greater master, in the Shepherd's Calendar as well as in the Faery Queen. Wetruck out of rhyme, so naturally as this. The Shepherd's Calendar contains perhaps the most picturese a double majesty. I do not mean that in the Shepherd's Calendar he had already achieved that transsion of sensuous delight. When he wrote the Shepherd's Calendar he was certainly a Puritan, and prf what is said in the epistle prefixed to the Shepherd's Calendar. He would have been wiser had he
Upton (search for this): chapter 2
ss as of no account, is in keeping with that sense of endless leisures which it is one chief merit of the poem to suggest. But Spenser's dilatation extends to thoughts as well as to phrases and images. He does not love the concise. Yet his dilatation is not mere distension, but the expansion of natural growth in the rich soil of his own mind, wherein the merest stick of a verse puts forth leaves and blossoms. Here is one of his, suggested by Homer: Iliad, XVII. 55 seqq. Referred to in Upton's note on Faery Queen, B. I. c. VII. 32. Into what a breezy couplet trailing off with an alexandrine has Homer's pnoiai\ pantoi/wn a)ne/mwn expanded! Chapman unfortunately has slurred this passage in his version, and Pope tittivated it more than usual in his. I have no other translation at hand. Marlowe was so taken by this passage in Spenser that he put it bodily into his Tamburlaine. Upon the top of all his lofty crest A bunch of hairs discolored diversly, With sprinkled pearl and
Ariosto (search for this): chapter 2
ing what he was, but what, under the given circumstances, it was possible for him to be. The fact that the great poem of Spenser was inspired by the Orlando of Ariosto, and written in avowed emulation of it, and that the poet almost always needs to have his fancy set agoing by the hint of some predecessor, must not lead us to ol follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth. The passage is one of the very few disgusting ones in the Faery Queen. Spenser was copying Ariosto; but the Italian poet, with the discreeter taste of his race, keeps to generalities. Spenser goes into particulars which can only be called nasty. He did this, d sweep of his measure, the beauty or vigor of his similes, the musical felicity of his diction, and the mellow versatility of his pictures. In this last quality Ariosto, whose emulous pupil he was, is as Bologna to Venice in the comparison. That, when the personal allusions have lost their meaning and the allegory has become a b
Lycidas (search for this): chapter 2
k is no doubt lost; a loss to be borne with less equanimity than that of Cicero's treatise De Gloria, once possessed by Petrarch. The passage I have italicized is most likely an extract, and reminds one of the long-breathed periods of Milton. Drummond of Hawthornden tells us, he [Ben Jonson] hath by heart some verses of Spenser's Calendar, about wine, between Coline and Percye (Cuddie and Piers). Drummond, it will be remarked, speaking from memory, takes Cuddy to be Colin. In Milton's Lycidas there are reminiscences of this eclogue as well as of that for May. The latter are the more evident, but I think that Spenser's Cuddie, the praise is better than the price, suggested Milton's But not the praise, Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears. Shakespeare had read and remembered this pastoral. Compare But, ah, Mecaenas is yclad in clay, And great Augustus long ago is dead, And all the worthies liggen wrapt in lead, with King Pandion, he is dead; All thy frie
Theocritus (search for this): chapter 2
e than translations from Marot; but for manner he instinctively turned back to Chaucer, the first and then only great English poet. He has given common instead of classic names to his personages, for characters they can hardly be called. Above all, he has gone to the provincial dialects for words wherewith to enlarge and freshen his poetical vocabulary. Sir Philip Sidney did not approve of this. That same framing of his style to an old rustic language I dare not allow, since neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sannazzaro in Italian did affect it. （Defence of Poesy.) Ben Jonson, on the other hand, said that Guarini kept not decorum in making shepherds speak as well as himself could. （Conversations with Drummond.) I think Sidney was right, for the poets' Arcadia is a purely ideal world, and should be treated accordingly. But whoever looks into the glossary appended to the Calendar by E. K., will be satisfied that Spenser's object was to find unhackneyed and poetic
Drummond (search for this): chapter 2
indarus. They sacked and burned his castle, from which he with his wife and children barely escaped. Ben Jonson told Drummond that one child perished in the flames. But he was speaking after an interval of twenty-one years, and, of course, from other hand, said that Guarini kept not decorum in making shepherds speak as well as himself could. （Conversations with Drummond.) I think Sidney was right, for the poets' Arcadia is a purely ideal world, and should be treated accordingly. But whoeen Jonson] hath by heart some verses of Spenser's Calendar, about wine, between Coline and Percye (Cuddie and Piers). Drummond, it will be remarked, speaking from memory, takes Cuddy to be Colin. In Milton's Lycidas there are reminiscences of this are in the Puritan tone, and as severe a one as any is in Mother Hubberd's Tale, published in 1591. Ben Jonson told Drummond that in that paper Sir W. Raleigh had of the allegories of his Faery Queen, by the Blatant Beast the Puritans were under
Cortez (search for this): chapter 2
been like sunshine to bring into flower all that there was of imaginative or sentimental in the English nature, already just in the first flush of its spring. (The yonge sonne Had in the Bull half of his course yronne.) And just at this moment of blossoming every breeze was dusty with the golden pollen of Greece, Rome, and Italy. If Keats could say, when he first opened Chapman's Homer,— Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise, if Keats could say this, whose mind had been unconsciously fed with the results of this culture,—results that permeated all thought, all literature, and all talk, —fancy what must have been the awakening shock and impulse communicated to men's brains by the revelation of this new world of thought and fancy, an unveiling gradual yet sudden, like that of a great organ, which discovered to t<
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