Spenser : Edmund (1552/53-99), English poet, his allegorical The Faerie Queene – in what became known as the Spenserian stanza – glorified England & English. James Thomson, Shelley, Keats, Byron, & T. S. Eliot acknowledged him as their master.
... Adventures in Criticism A Plea for Spenser Among great English poets the one who has suffered in these days of jangling nerves and psycho-analytic aberrations the utmost neglect because of his matter, mood and manner is Edmund Spenser. To the modern mind with its personal and introspective bent he seems quite useless, especially as he expended his imagination... individual scenes and episodes rich in the poetic vein that to skip Spenser completely would be a considerable aesthetic loss, larger at least than that entailed by missing to study how Mr. Aldous Huxley recoils from the Elizabethan romanticist's so-called sugary vagueness to pen doggerel about spermatozoa. It is true that Spenser does not deal with problems immediately facing us, but after all... to convey a mood-atmosphere, does not as a rule belong in its true poetic nature to Chaucer: it is the new element Spenser brought into play and it is the element which constitutes the vital differentia of great poetry, transfiguring the substance beyond the reach of prose style. Spenser is not uniformly Page 10 successful, all his charm cannot persuade us that his narrative does ...
... Classical and Romantic 4 The climax of the first Romanticism: Elizabethan poetry -Shakespeare and Spenser As a poet of Romantic drama, Shakespeare is - to quote Sri Aurobindo's words 1 - "quite unique in his spirit, method and quality. For his contemporaries resemble him only in exter-nals'; they have the same outward form and crude materials... enlarged and intense breath of living, an ultra-natural play of beauty, curiosity and amplitude." Next to Shakespeare in stature as representative of the Romanticism of the Renaissance stands Spenser. In him the strain of sheer vitalistic beauty in a fluid fineness, which is one of Shakespeare's qualities, reaches its fullest abundance, to-gether with a vein of dreamy subtlety which too in the... impulse towards an utterance of the creative life-power within which drives towards the dramatic form and acts with such unexampled power in Shakespeare; at another extremity of the Elizabethan mind, in Spenser, it gets farther away from the actuality of life and takes its impressions as hints only for a purely imaginative creation which has an aim at things sym-bolic, otherwise revelatory, deeper down in ...
... less Shakespeare. Even Spenser he puts above them in a total view. Thus, relating them to the Elizabethan Age, he tells us: "They have a greater thing to reveal than the Elizabethan poets, but they do not express it with that constant fullness of native utterance or that more perfect correspondence between substance and form which is the greatness of Shakespeare and Spenser." 4 After marking the frequent... be termed creative genius and perhaps even Milton's solitary creation, Satan, would have breathed more life than anything in Shelley and Keats. But they would have equalled and excelled Spenser all-round. Spenser has "more of a descriptive vision than of the larger creative power or narrative force" 3 and so his human figures through whom he works out his scheme of a romantico-ethical story stand... had been ready and they themselves had possessed more insight into their general destiny, Shelley and Keats, on account of their supreme gifts, could have stood higher than Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser so far as "fullness of native utterance" and "perfect correspondence between substance and form" are concerned. Neither of them had the capacity to create living characters: so they could not have ...
... others"—they intrigue me even more. Who are these others? Saintsbury as good as declares that poetry is Shelley and Shelley poetry—Spenser alone, to his mind, can contest the right to that equation. (Shakespeare, of course, is admittedly hors concours.) Aldous Huxley abominates Spenser: the fellow has got nothing to say and says it with a consummately cloying melodiousness! Swinburne, as is well known, could... claim a place beside Valmiki, Sophocles beside Aeschylus. The rest, if you like, you can send into the third row with Goethe, but it is something of a promotion about which one can feel some qualms. Spenser too, if you like; it is difficult to draw a line. Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth have not been brought into consideration although their best work is as fine poetry as any written, but they have... courage, is that Spenser's melodiousness cloyed upon Aldous Huxley and that perhaps points to a serious defect somewhere in Spenser's art or in his genius but this does not cancel the poetic value of Spenser. Swinburne and Arnold are equally unbalanced on either side of their see-saw about Hugo. He might be described as a great but imperfect genius who just missed the very first rank because his word sometimes ...
... expression abounds in an unstinted measure, but for the music of a deeper spirit or higher significance we have to wait; the attempt at it we get, but not often all the success of its presence. Spenser, the poet of second magnitude of the time, gives us in his work this beauty in its fullest abundance, but also the limited measure of that greater but not quite successful endeavour. The Faerie Queene... idea for the sake of what is essential in it, but tangles it up in all sorts of turns and accessories: seizing on all manner of disparates, it tends to throw them together without any real fusion. Spenser in his idea and its Page 84 execution fell a victim to all these defects of the intelligence. He has taken his intellectual scheme from his Hellenism, the virtues to be figured in typical... works out to its issues, cannot be merely the good or the evil, this or that virtue or vice; they should stand for them as their expressive opportunity of life, not merely as their allegorical body. Spenser, a great poet, is not blind to this elementary condition; but his tangled skein of allegory continually hampers the sounder conception, and the interpretative narration works itself out through the ...
... mystical - in musical suggestions deepening the sight. Tennyson is at times fine both in eye and ear but often gives an impression of decoration. Spenser is a most melodious rhythmist and a sensitive word-painter, but tends to monotony. And, except for Spenser, none of them has such an amount of accomplished work as Milton, and nobody rivals him in the long drawn-out structure of modulated harmony.... that the poet is distinguished as an artist. Milton is acknowledged to be the pre-eminent artist among English poets. Only five others qualify to come anywhere near him: they are, in order of time, Spenser, Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti, Yeats. Out of them Keats is the most original: in originality he is far superior to Milton. Sri Aurobindo calls Keats "the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English ...
... led nowhere at all, there was a laborious trudging round in a futile circle; the other turned straight back towards accentual metre and ended in the entire abandonment of the quantitative principle. Spenser in his experiments used all his sovereign capacity to force English verse into an unnatural classical mould, Sidney followed his example. Harvey thought, rightly enough, that an adaptation to the natural... inescapable feature. That makes all the difference; it turns this kind of verse into a frolic of false quantities. In any case, Page 320 the method has invariably resulted in failure from Spenser to Bridges; the greatness of some of the poets who have made this too daring and unnatural effort, has not been great enough to bring success to an impossible adventure. There remains the alternative... out in English literature as a new form perfectly accomplished and accepted. This may be perhaps because the attempt was always made as a sort of leisure exercise and no writer of great genius like Spenser, Tennyson or Swinburne has made it a main part of his work; but, more probably, there is a deeper cause inherent in the very principle and method of the endeavour. Two poets, Clough and Longfellow ...
... the self-consciousness thatbesets all literary revivals" and "any self-conscious bookish- ness proves particularly deadly" when the half-conscious dream-levels have to find utterance. "In Tasso, or Spenser, or . Sidney's Arcadia there is a sickly taint of the factitious, of pastiche.... Even Ariosto, who shields himself behind a mocker's grin, with his interminable necromancers and magic steeds gives... Finally, he has the observation: "There is much, then, that is 'romantic' in classical Greek literature; yet it would Page 53 be easy to exaggerate. Homer is never unreal as Spenser is; Aeschylus never outrages common sense or common taste like Marlowe." 32 It is evident that Lucas is not unaware of Roman-ticism in Elizabethan poetry. Still, no whole-hearted and clear-eyed a ...
... 60 however, that romanticism is not only the cause of Shakespeare's way with images. In romantic poetry itself there are two ways of using imagery — that of poets like Spenser, Milton and Tennyson and that of poets like Shakespeare and Donne. Donne differs from Shakespeare in several respects and is a much inferior and less harmonised poet on the whole and often he... writer, noting some of these points in Shakespeare, quoted the phrase: Was the hope drunk Wherein you dressed yourself? Such a phrase would be impossible to find in Spenser or Tennyson, very rare in Milton for all his compact force. I am not quite clear as to what conclusion I should draw about the nature of poetry from your paragraph about aesthetics and ...
... the Johnsonian critic. I may add, however, that romanticism is not the only cause of Shakespeare's way with images. In romantic poetry itself there are two ways of using imagery -that of poets like Spenser, Milton and Tennyson and that of poets like Shakespeare and Donne. Donne differs from Shakespeare in several respects and is a much inferior and less harmonised poet on the whole and often he falls... changing images. A recent writer, noting some of these points in Shakespeare, quoted the phrase: Was the hope drunk Wherein you dressed yourself? Such a phrase would be impossible to find in Spenser or Page 135 Tennyson, it would be very rare in Milton for all his compact force. As for a quick play of varying images in mystical poetry, there is a striking passage in the ...
... the Johnsonian critic. I may add, however, that romanticism is not the only cause of Shakespeare's way with images. In romantic poetry itself there are two ways of using imagery - that of poets like Spenser, Milton and Tennyson and that of poets like Shakespeare and Donne. Donne differs from Shakespeare in several respects and is a much inferior and less harmonised poet on the whole and often he falls... images. A recent writer, noting some of these points in Shakespeare, quoted the phrase: Was the hope drunk Wherein you dressed yourself? Such a phrase would be impossible to find in Spenser or Tennyson, it would be very rare in Milton for all his compact force. As for a quick play of varying images in mystical poetry, there is a striking passage in the first canto of Savitri, ...
... see what quarry the English poetic tradition afforded him in this respect. He drew upon the Elizabethan predilection for old and learned and "romantic" words though he did not go to the length of Spenser, Sir Thomas Browne or the "sugary" sonneteers of the period. He resorted to the use of technical terms and unusual turns of speech, like the Metaphysicals, and to the use of Latinisms and involved... invent: He was the first creator, I am the last. 8 Similarly, in passages which express subtle states of the soul, he hews his quarry from the Romantic tradition in poetry from the time of Spenser and Shakespeare to that of Swinburne and Yeats. But this does not mean that Savitri is a mosaic in its design and fragmentary in its execution. It has a flexible diction, a diction that ...
... official admiration for Shakespeare & Milton but with them as with the majority of Englishmen the poets they really steep themselves in are Shelley, Tennyson & Byron and to a less degree Keats & perhaps Spenser. Now the manner of these poets, lax, voluptuous, artificial, all outward glitter and colour, but inwardly poor of spirit and wanting in genuine mastery and the true poetical excellence is a bad school... pomp and imagery of Kalidasa's numbers and Page 304 the somewhat gaudy, expensive & meretricious spirit of English poetry, Vyasa may seem bald and unattractive. To be fed on the verse of Spenser, Shelley, Keats, Byron & Tennyson is no good preparation for the severest of classics. It is indeed, I believe, the general impression of many "educated" young Indians that the Mahabharata is a mass ...
... well as of Dante and Milton, Corneille and Racine, is the art Ellis attributes to Ristori. The Elizabethans - in one mode Marlowe Page 183 and his fellow-dramatists, in the other Spenser and, in both, Shakespeare - practise what he sees as Salvini's art. The peak-point of the later Romanticism, the English poetry of the time of Wordsworth, carries the art that he conceives to be C... itself at such length as did that of Classicism or what the old Romanticism had produced: therefore none of its poets can be taken cumulatively as the equal of Homer or Dante, Shakespeare or even Spenser. However, its best work is genuinely of the first order - and the significance of that work is paramount by reason of the very nature, as explained by Sri Aurobindo, of poetry. To quote Sri ...
... language and rhythm and been fused in his personality into something wonderfully strong and rich and beautiful. Sug- Page 114 gestions and secrets have been caught from Chaucer, Peele, Spenser, Shakespeare, and their hints have given a strange grace to a style whose austerity of power has been nourished by great classical influences; Virgilian beauty and majesty, Lucretian grandeur and ... Miltonic. Yet a very sensitive perception can feel that there passes through the Aurobindonian a faint quiver of beauty, a secret breath of sweetness, a touch part Virgil part Shakespeare and part Spenser, which the Miltonic with its austerer accent has all but lost to power and greatness. Not that Milton's passage is the least bit inferior in poetic quality, nor can we regret that Milton wrote ...
... progress to trace: whether the curve comes full circle or not depends upon a large complex of circumstances. Among English poets, only two got to the end of their journey — Shakespeare and Milton. Spenser fell within eyeshot of his goal: nobody else did even so much. Coleridge did famous things, but his destination remained vague because Wordsworth's soul-composing mind-assuring simplicity was removed... traceable which cannot be called Shelleyan. That Keats and Shelley could intermingle Page 83 without the least catastrophic consequence is evident, since both had a strong dash of Spenser: I could even undertake to show that one influence on the verse of Hyperion came from Prometheus Unbound. In the latter poem the Miltonic turn also is not absent, while the Shakespearean tone ...
... pieces have a virgin coldness & loftiness in their beauty. To intellects fed on the elaborate pomp and imagery of Kalidasa's numbers... Vyasa may seem bald and unattractive. To be fed on the verse of Spenser, Shelley, Keats, Byron and Tennyson is no good preparation for the severest classics. It is indeed I believe, the general impression of many 'educated' young Indians that the Mahabharata is a mass... occult dimension get fused with occurrences of the earth and we meet with part romance, part allegory, part reality, part spiritual vision, a kind of super-Faery-Queene by a poet far greater than Spenser in imaginative thought, rhythmic expression, character-creativity and quantity of quality. The Christian parable of a Fall is seen differently by the old Kabbalists. They conceive a Rise from the ...
... nowadays in all the arts, but I doubt whether any English or French critic or prosodist would go so far as to dub "Who killed Cock Robin?" the true movement of English rhythm, putting aside Chaucer, Spenser, Pope or Shelley as too cultivated and accomplished or too much under foreign influence or to seek for his models in popular songs or the products of the café chantant in preference to Hugo or Musset ...
... I do not need it. I can understand Krishnaprem's strictures or his reservations (without endorsing, refuting or qualifying them) but I have had the same view about very great poets like Shelley or Spenser at one time, so that does not seriously touch my feeling that this is poetry of beauty and value. Also I do not make comparisons—I take it by itself as a thing apart in its own province. I know of ...
... Elizabethan poets, but they do not express it with that constant fullness of native utterance or that more perfect correspondence between substance and form which is the greatness of Shakespeare and Spenser. This failure to grasp the conditions of a perfect intuitive and spiritual poetry has not yet been noted, because the attempt itself has not been understood by the critical mind of the nineteenth ...
... insuperable. (vii) On p. 352, line 5, "verily evidently" is a misprint for "very evidently". These are, however, flaws of little importance. More serious is the claim, put forward on p. 321 that Spenser, Tennyson and Swinburne were great geniuses. It would be nearer the truth to say that they were poets whose technical ability was considerable. New and strange opinions! "My opinion" would be ...
... their solution. The poems of Clough and Longfellow are, I think, the only serious essays in the hexameter in English literature. Many have dallied with the problem, from the strange experiments of Spenser to the insufficient but carefully reasoned attempts of Matthew Arnold. But it is only by a long and sustained effort like Evangeline or the Bothie that the solution can really come. Longfellow ...
... "well-loved", "overwhelming sweetness", "the voice loved to linger", "half-angered", "a lovely slave rebellious who had erred", "touches soft" - are all such as would tend to occur in most poets from Spenser down to the period of World War I. To frown on this sort of writing as being "linguistic clutter" is to forget the Blakean beauty that is exuberance. Can there be a greater master of "linguistic clutter" ...
... England stands head and shoulders above other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Page 51 Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. In consequence of the intensely inspired impact of poets like these, the versatile English language has acquired a unique ...
... Elizabethan poets, but they do not express it with that constant fullness of native utterance or that more perfect correspondence between substance and form which is the greatness of Shakespeare and Spenser." 12 With a critical grip Sri Aurobindo 13 sets in proper psychological relation to its immediate past and to the succeeding age the English Romantics' "brilliant and beautiful attempt to get ...
... high artistic potency of suggestion. The Song of Solomon is exotic in its poignant richness of word and vision; the Book of Job is exotic in the figurative revel of its grandiose closing argument; Spenser and Keats are exotic when they diffuse their heavily-charged sen-suousness. What is essential is that confusion should be avoided and some clear outline cling to the warm colour-riot both en masse ...
... criterion we must remember that in speaking of "men" he did not confine himself to his ordinary contemporaries, much less his humble Cumberland neighbours: he included also "men" like Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton, the three poets he perhaps valued most. What he really aimed at when he intuitively rather than intellectually understood and followed his theory was a certain simplicity and austerity ...
... word ' twixt in the lightning-line is insensitive. He regards this word as horrible and calls it "a crutch for amateur versifiers". Strange that a word which can be found in all the best poets from Spenser downwards and which has nothing unpoetic about it except that twentieth-century poets do not frequendy employ it should be criticised at just the place where it is most appropriate. When William Watson ...
... South American colonies. Elizabeth’s reign became England’s Golden Age. It was the age of the playwrights Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; of the poets John Donne, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Georges Chapman; of the musicians Thomas Tallis and William Byrd; of the seafarers and explorers Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Martin Frobisher, John Davies and John Hawkins; of the ...
... mind 344 Sophocles 205 soul description 115 evolving 81 in ancient scriptures 3,5 liberating 182 life force and 134 poetry and 165 progress and 312 Spenser 46,187 spiritual growth 312 Light 177 Vita Nuova 208 Sri Aurobindo cultural consciousness of 208 Descent on 24 Nov 1926 273 letters on Savitri 13,50,58,275 ...
... sweep and grandeur are aimed at, we can dispense with it, provided we substitute this loss by other technical devices like enjambement, verse-paragraph, stress-modulation and inflexion. Chaucer and Spenser, prior to Milton, had retained rhyme, obviously because they had not outgrown the French influence. Also the language had not grown virile enough for the load of blank verse. It is not that Milton ...
... all the arts, but I doubt whether any English or French critic or prosodist would go so far as to turn to "Who killed Cock Robin?" for the true movement of English rhythm, putting aside Chaucer, Spenser, Pope or ____________________ 1. "Never does anyone who practises good come to woe" (Gita, 6.40). Page 307 Shelley as too cultivated and accomplished or too much under foreign ...
... is applicable to other fields or domains of consciousness: it is, as it were, monovalent. An allegory is never mysticism. There is more mysticism in Wordsworth, even in Shelley and Keats, than in Spenser, for example, who stands in this respect on the same ground as Bunyan in his The Pilgrim's Progress. Take Wordsworth as a Nature-worshipper, Breaking the silence of the seas Among the ...
... survives untouched all adverse criticism, not because there are not plenty of fairly large spots in this sun, but because in any complete view of him they disappear in the greatness of his light. Spenser and Marlowe are poets of a high order, great in spite of an eventual failure. But the rest owe their stature to an uplifting power in the age and not chiefly to their own intrinsic height of genius; ...
... of Tennyson or a book of Milton, at most two plays of Shakespeare, a work of Bacon's or Burke's full of ideas which he is totally incompetent to digest and one or two stray books of Pope, Dryden, Spenser or other, & to crown this pretentious little heap a mass of second-hand criticism dealing with poets & writers of whom he has not studied a single line. When we remember that English is the main study ...
... do not, need it. I can understand Krishnaprem's strictures or his rev ervation (without endorsing, refuting or qualifying them) but I have had the same view about very great poets like Shelley or Spenser at one time, so that does not seriously touch my feeling that this is poetry of beauty and value- Also I do no make comparisons—I take it by itself as nothing apart on it own province- I know of ...
... is not the reason for rejecting "you" which too is legitimate for the plural: the reason is the better poetic effect to Keats's ear which more than the ear of other Romantic poets was influenced by Spenser. To justify "ye" in the poem's last line all we require to do is to ask whether "ye" may replace "thou" which is in the singular number. Surely it is known that "you" can replace "thou". I can give ...
... not taken absolute prisoner — sense and soul laid under a spell — as one is again and again by the speeches in Shakespeare. Shelley was a "born" poet, so much so that, after Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser, nobody has been productive to such an extent and with such a sustained poetic quality as he, yet it was not because of his facility only that he could be a channel of almost continual inspiration ...
... there is a controlled power, there is an harmonious intensity, which distinguish it from poetic articulations such as we find in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso or Spenser's Faerie Queane. Ariosto and Spenser can be very poetic, but they are not epic in tone. Even when they bring a frame of mind akin to Homer's or Virgil's, Dante's or Milton's, something in the way of their speech lacks the epic touch. ...
... 1891, when Bowden joined the firm of Ward, Lock, and Co.), "unannotated edition, edited with a critical memoir by William Michael Rossetti". Among these notes, "two detect echoes from Goethe and Spenser, several remark metrical irregularities or faulty rhymes..." Three in all record variant readings. One of them, apropos of The magnetic Lady to her Patient , has textual variations pencilled in, ...
... occasions the colouring shows a touch of the minutely marking as well as luxurious painter eye of the young Tennyson, and not infrequently the phrasing bears an aspect of traditional poeticism from Spenser down to William Watson, which especially the rebellious modernist ear may dub wearying. In a semi-modernist manner we get at a few moments an affinity to Gerard Manley Hopkins. But if we look deeper ...
... is a controlled power, there is an harmonious intensity, which distinguish it from poetic articulations such as we find in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso or Spenser's Faerie Queane. Ariosto and Spenser can be very poetic, but they are not epic in tone. Even when they bring a frame of mind akin to Homer's or Virgil's, Dante's or Milton's, something in the way of their speech lacks the epic touch ...
... company of the universal poets, like Homer and Shakespeare, in whom everything human touches some chord and passes into music. But they are closer to common life than Pope or Dryden, even than Milton or Spenser. It would be hard to think of another man who combined, as Blake did, an extraordinary power of vision with the tenderest compassion for the outcast and the oppressed, or who, like Shelley, used his ...
... career. There is the romantic mood of wonder and exultation, the penchant for Greek mythology and the Greek spirit in its movement towards the beautiful mingled with the sublime, the distant charm of Spenser, the Miltonic majesty, the Shakespearean * Much have I travelled in the realms of gold And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards ...
... bringing out rhythmically the essence of a thing. How important to poetic effect though not to metre itself the role of quantity often is, can be seen from many fine verses — these, for example, from Spenser: Open the temple gates unto my love, Open them wide that she may enter in. The long "o" of "open" vivifies the meaning of that word, the long "a" of "gates" hints the openness which ...
... "insight" at the beginning of this causerie, let me wind up by quoting again the poet I commenced with -Robinson Jeffers. I shall put a passage by him side by side with one from Swinburne and another from Spenser. In a well-known poem Swinburne asks us to be thankful That no man lives for ever, That dead men rise up never, And even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. The verses ...
... create it in obedience to some master-urge within that keeps a visionary fire burning in their hearts and minds in the midst of common, frivolous and even indecorous talking and living. But when a Spenser, a Shelley, a Keats, a Morris or a Yeats speaks of loveliness, we cannot dismiss it as a vulgar and squashy word. They mean something that is neither Page 87 facile nor cheap, weak ...
... all adverse criticism, not because there are not plenty of fairly large spots in this sun, but because in any complete view of him they disappear in the greatness of Page 72 his lustre. Spenser and Marlowe are poets of a high order, great in spite of an eventual failure. But the rest owe their stature to an uplifting power in the age and not chiefly to their own intrinsic height of genius; ...
... themselves together into his high language and rhythm and were fused in his personality into something wonderfully strong, rich and beautiful. Suggestions and secrets were caught from Chaucer, Peele, Spenser, Shakespeare, and their hints gave a strange grace to a style whose austerity of power had been nourished by great classical influences. A touch of Virgilian beauty and majesty, a poise of Lucretian ...
... shallow and vehement current, they vary one idea or harp on the same imagination without any final success in expressing it inevitably. Examples of the rajasic stimulus are commonest in Shelley and Spenser, but few English poets are free from it. This is the rajasic fault in expression. But the fiery stimulus also perverts or hampers the substance. An absence of self-restraint, an unwillingness to restrict ...
... and rhythm. It varies in intensity: for the lower intensity we can get plenty of examples from Chaucer, when he is indulging his imagination rather than his observation, and at a higher pitch from Spenser; for the loftier intensity we can cite at will for one kind from Milton's early poetry, for another from poets who have a real spiritual vision like Keats and Shelley. English poetry runs, indeed, ...
... ear as impossible as would be to the English ear the line made up by Tagore: "Autumn flaunteth in his bushy bowers"? In English such a violence could not be entertained for a moment. It was because Spenser and others tried to base their hexameters and pentameters on this flagrant violation of the first law of English rhythm that the first attempt to introduce quantitative metres in English proved a failure ...
... vocables in which the life and light have become faded in some measure by over-use in the past. An instance is the adjective "vernal". It has been an instrument of poetic diction since the time of Spenser. At its appearance in our day we should put ourselves on the alert, for the likelihood of a labour-saving articulation can arise with it. In The Fear of Death we saw it occur in an overflow from ...
... poetically blossom forth if you intensely re-live the expression of other poets? At least it was the experience of Keats that he awoke to his own poetic possibili-ties by intensely re-living the work of Spenser. And most poets draw a quickening spark from great poems when their own crea- Page 3 tive fire sinks a little. If I may indulge in a bit of symbol-reading I should declare that the ...
... characters are a little wooden. Among those who have just missed entering the third row are the Roman Lucretius, the Greek Euripides, the Spanish Calderon, the French Corneille and Hugo, the English Spenser. While mentioning the various names I noticed one of you trying to anticipate the roll by whispering "Wordsworth". Well, Sri Aurobindo has said that Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats have been left ...
... change over it. English Page 51 poetry is a field of adventure, with abrupt starts and turns, as it were, from the homely and sunny work of Chaucer to the opulent exquisiteness of Spenser and the multi-toned passion of Shakespeare, from the Elizabethan period to the time of the Metaphysicals with their scholarly or mystic exercise of wit and on to Milton's Latin-moulded polyphony of ...
... creativity. The English language was sufficiently developed by Milton's time. We have just to mark Milton's life-span - 1608-1674 - to realise how much poetic writing had gone before. Not only had Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson worked on English poetry; Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster, Marston, Massinger, Shirley, Heywood, Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Campion - all these were born fairly ...
... will dispute that England stands head and shoulders above other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. If we may add from those to whom English was native outside England, there is the free-verse ...
... melancholy. An idyll is a poem which expresses a romantic figuration of life, a Shelleyan world "where moonlight and music and feeling are one". A prothalamium is a preliminary to a marriage song. Edmund Spenser of the Elizabethan Age coined the word and made it famous by a poem of his to go with another entitled "Epithalamium", the Marriage Song. This means a poem which expresses joy. Not only the romantic ...
... word '"twixt" in the lightning-line is insensitive. He regards this word as horrible and calls it "a crutch for amateur versifiers". Strange that a word which can be found in all the best poets from Spenser downwards and which has nothing unpoetic about it except that twentieth-century poets do not frequently employ it should be criticised at just the place where it is most appropriate. When William Watson ...
... 23 himself feels that though he has called several things in Greek poetry Romantic he would like not to exaggerate; for Homer and Aeschylus never sound the extreme Romantic note that is heard in Spenser and Marlowe, while Catullus in even his "Romantic frenzy" is still "Classically clear". Could we argue that impulses and fantasies were not as much at work? Should we put Aeschylus, for instance, below ...
... 221 Siva, 31, 278 Socrates, 12, 58, 73, 98, 239, 281 Soma, 23, 28-9, 44-5, 165, 167, 184 Song if Solomon, 66-7 Sophocles, 73, 86, 187, 189 Spain, 205 Spengler, 297 Spenser, 68 Spinoza, 98 Sri Aurobindo, 49, 52, 54, 55n., 58-62, 64-5n., 67n., 75-6n., 81n., 1O2n., 126, 132, 135, 162n., 176, 179, 183-4, 224, 226-9, 233, 235, 248, 286 -Collecwd Poems & Plqys ...
... poet himself who, incapacitated by the unaccomplished dreams, feels the urge to fulfil his desire to create. The contrast here is not between the whiteness of the Swan and the icicles as in Spenser's Prothalomion; but, it is between the ici -has (the Swan in the frozen lake) and the là - bas (the Azure). These contradictory themes also find expression in L'Après midi d'un Faune ...
... absorbed too – Genesis, the Book of Job, David's Psalms, Isaiah, the Gospels, the Apocalypse poured their splendour and terror into his spirit. From England itself, he was deeply influenced by Spenser's melodious subtlety, Marlowe's colourful violence, the multitudinous leaping lights and shadows that are Shakespeare's. He surcharged himself with past poetry to such an extent that he won access ...
... of art that has its value. Allegory is an intellectual form; one is not expected to believe in the personalisation of the abstract quality, it is only an artistic device. When in an allegory as in Spenser's Faerie Queene the personalisation, the embodiment takes first place and absorbs the major part of the mind's interest, the true style and principle of this art have been abandoned. The allegorical ...
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