Mapping 'The Faerie Queene': Quest Structures and the World of the Poem

1998 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 793
Author(s):  
J. B. Lethbridge ◽  
Wayne Erickson
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The World ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Borris
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Poetic Imagination ◽  
National Significance ◽  
Shepheardes Calender ◽  
The Faerie Queene

This book defines Platonism’s roles in early modern theories of literature, then turns to reappraise the Platonizing major poet Edmund Spenser. Platonic concerns and conceptions profoundly affected early modern English and continental poetics, yet the effects have had little attention. Literary Platonism energized pursuits of the sublime, and knowledge of this approach to poetry yields cogent new understandings of Spenser’s poetics, his major 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 Optics of Prediction in The Faerie Queene: Merlin’s Reflecting Telescope

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-28
Author(s):  
Kyle Pivetti
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Crystal Ball ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Scientific Advances

A mirror or a crystal ball? That interpretive crux arises at the heart of Book iii of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene – when Britomart discovers Merlin’s “glassy globe” and first sees Arthegall in its surface. The “looking-glasse,” that is, not only reflects Britomart but also tells the future. This essay revisits the problem of Merlin’s glass by locating it in the context of rapidly developing sixteenth-century optics, and one invention in particular: the reflecting telescope. By 1590, a range of thinkers from John Dee to Leonard Digges discovered in the reflective properties of mirrors innovative ways to understand human sight, cognition, and prediction. And it is Digges that proposes a reflecting telescope, a device that Merlin employs in Book iii. These scientific advances, in turn, inform Spenser’s references to vision and reflection throughout the poem, granting his allegory the ability both to distort sight and counter-intuitively to produce the future. Indeed, The Faerie Queene uses misrepresentation to protect its queen and to protect budding projects of nationalism. To see, for Spenser, is to change “the world it self” and to bring about its British futures.

Mapping the Faerie Queene: Quest Structures and the World of the Poem.

1997 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 942
Author(s):  
William C. Johnson ◽  
Wayne Erickson
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The World ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Signs and Seasons in Edmund Spenser's Fairie Queene

1993 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76
Author(s):  
James R. Fisher ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Structural Transition ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Imitation Of Christ ◽  
The World ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
The Universe

This essay explores how the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser incorporates a zodiac, calendar, and history into his allegory, each based on the twelve signs, and each Christ-centered, In Spenser's historical allegory, Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, symbolically travels through the zodiac, sign by sign, in a quintessentially Christian odyssey. Guyon's Imitation of Christ in the center of Book II of The Faerie Queene marks the structural transition between classical and Christian temperance, reflected in a physical transition from the lunar to the solar signs of the zodiac. By modelling the world of Book II on the zodiac, Spenser epitomizes the Renaissance theory of poetics: To create a poem modelled on the universe was to worship its Creator.

The Faerie Queene

1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene
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