Thoughts?

>the gay fag

I would read some Shakespeare to get used to the language (since Shakespeare is somewhat between our English and Spencer's)
Shakespeare then Spencer then Chaucer then pearl poet.
Ease your way back in the language's history

His Fowre Hymns was written the same year as the final part of Faerie Queene, so start here – it deals with the Platonic frenzies and their role in the ascent of the soul.

Syncretism in the West: Pico's 900 Theses by Stephen Farmer is an excellent study and translation of a key work that is essential to understand the Christian Platonism of the Renaissance. Supplement with Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man in the Hackett edition and you should have an excellent foundation for engaging with Spenser.

piers plowman. read other elizabethan sonneteers to get used to the style

you could also check out orlando furioso and ovid's metamorphoses. would recommend at least reading the metamorphoses before spenser

that's why this is the book to read in public if you're 100% secure in your masculinity

A beautiful masterpiece. It is only outshone by Milton because of two points:
1) it's unfinished, obviously a detractor
2) it's less theologically inclined, hence why it doesn't have a driving force of thousands of years of christianity behind it to begin with and can never compete on such a grand or 'universal' scale as paradise lost

That being said it is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in literature and should be an absolute must-read for every english schoolboy and girl, except it isn't because Spenser wasn't a gay paki and the subject matter wasn't how whitey is evil.

All knights from High Romance are dumb like Redcrosse, which is why they're constantly satirized in works like Don Quixote and the Divine Comedy

Also probably lost street cred from Byron taking the piss

its too bad because Byron could have gained a lot from the FQ if he's been able to sink his teeth in it. His failure in this regard accounts for some of the distance between himself and Keats/Shelley, to his own discredit

i was nodding along with this post (and thread in general) until I got to
>the Divine Comedy

elaborate

Somehow concluding with the Blatant Beast loose and at large in Europe (and now the West) seemed appropriate, fine as the Mutabilitie Cantos are, etc.
Byron too stumbles upon an almost perfect conclusion in his unfinished epic as well.

bamp

Oh sorry for getting to you this late, but a lot of the second Circle is devoted to critiquing the Courtly Love aspect of High Romance. Paulo and Francesca were reading the Lancelot story (assumedly by Chretién) when they committed their adultery and continued to blame the book and Love even in Hell. Tristan is there as well and there's a line:

>"No sooner had I heard my teacher name the ancient ladies and the knights, than pity seized me, and I was like a man astray."

Bump

I remember picking this up at a thrift store. Guess I better man up and read it.

>except it isn't because Spenser wasn't a gay paki and the subject matter wasn't how whitey is evil.
Or, I don't know, because the prose is archaic and near unintelligible (especially for schoolchildren)?

I got the big red edition. It's the one.

>prose

Not only are you mediocre, but you don't know what you are talking about.

I want that one but it's so expensive.

It would be flawless if he finished it. A perfect example of how ridiculously difficult poetry used to be and how far we've fallen today. I actually wrote a Spenser essay that got picked for an early modern symposium. Spenser was the god. It's sad that almost no one talks about him anymore.

I trudged through the big red during undergraduate. It was a beast, but so rewarding. Hamilton's notes helped a lot.

Buck up on your Queen Liz history, maybe read the bible, and take a look at Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar and View of the Present State of Ireland.

The poetry is perfectly digestible without reading anything else because Spenser was incredibly talented. He made Milton look like a bitch.

>He made Milton look like a bitch.

ehhh

nobody makes milton look like a bitch. i love spenser but come on.

The action often does not stand by itself without allegory, and the characters and incidents often do not have a natural, logical connection with that which they are supposed to represent. Ridiculously inflexible stanza form. Some good visual passages, but unreadable as a whole work. Spenser is probably one of the most overrated English Renaissance authors. The "plain" writers, like Gascoigne, Grenville, Jonson, etc are much more successful at lyrics because of their lack of gaudy Petrarchianism, and Paradise Lost is a better English epic. But of course he is still necessary to know. I personally prefer Spenser's two marriage songs.

>The action often does not stand by itself without allegory, and the characters and incidents often do not have a natural, logical connection with that which they are supposed to represent. Ridiculously inflexible stanza form.

these qualities are part and parcel to the FQ's strength, even as they set limitations.

action is one of the poem's central thematic preoccupations. the FQ puts forth a constant series of adventures, fights, amorous pursuits, perambulations but has the weird sense of being completely still and outside time, more like a series of paintings than a film or a play. and battles are won, ladies are rescued, but without any sense of resolution. its one damned thing after another. the stanza structure, ending on a line of hexameter after 8 lines of pentameter, slows the action down by design - almost like the poem is actively trying to push you out of itself, trying to resist holding your attention, pulling you down towards sleep. i think of FQ as 'dreamlike' in quite a literal sense, almost like Spenser was aiming his poem at the part of the mind that isn't active during waking consciousness. reading the poem is supposed to 'fashion you into a gentleman,' but its deliberately obscure, as though you are supposed to forget what happens - how does that make sense? its all part of what makes this one of the strangest poems in the language

spenser's style does not always lend itself to pleasurable reading but you have to chew him over like a cow eats cud, passing through 4 stomachs. if what you took away is that hes "one of the most overrated renaissance authors" im going to have to accuse you of missing something

Yeah, the notes are very good. Reading it aloud is also mandatory.

>of knights and ladies gentle deeds
Is there anything comfiest than reading FQ?

Get into the rhythm of it and it's a piece of cake, even engrossing. Similar pattern applies when learning to read Shakespeare.

That was rhetorical, Faerie Queene is the comfiest, senpai

I don't disagree, but the comfiness didn't 'take me in her velvet paws' until ca. midway through book 2, which is about where I ceased to rely upon the glossary, and became engrossed. DESU. A similar situation occurred much earlier when beginning my wrestle cum tea party with Shakespeare....

A good post. I don't personally believe that Spenser is more visually acute in FQ, however, than Milton in PL. In fact your concluding remark that FQ is one of the most psychedlic poems in English or any language may easily be read as contradicting your initial statement. More colorful I'll grant, but nothing in FQ matches Milton's visual sharpness in book 4's description of the Garden, for instance. I base this on two memories of my impressions of each so I could be mistaken.
I've read FQ only once however. PL three or four times.

>In fact your concluding remark that FQ is one of the most psychedlic poems in English or any language may easily be read as contradicting your initial statement

maybe. i didn't only mean 'psychedelic' in a visual sense: it's just as much the pervasive sense of obscurity and amnesia. psychedelic trips are full of incredible visions and insights that you immediately forget.

you could have me on milton's description of the garden, its been five years since i read PL and i do remember the garden as visually gorgeous, but overall id stick with what i said. in milton the ideas are usually more sharply defined than the image of what's happening; in spenser the reverse.

i think this fits into part of milton's larger point actually. spenser follows the ancients more closely in having his figures sensually perceivable, as the greeks represented their gods in statues - limited and bounded by space, acting in space. problem of idolatry is that the real often looks exactly the same as the fake (e.g. florimell and false florimell)

in milton, who self-consciously sought to surpass the old epics, and situated himself far on the protestant end of the spectrum (contra-idols), the figures of God, the angels and rebel angels, take on dimensions so large they defy imagination - and they have to, to demonstrate that the Christian cosmic drama is a bigger deal than the Titanomachy. the war in heaven in Book 6 is a representative example of this - the weird smoke-belching satanic engines, God's angels hurling 'uprooted hills' at the rebel host, the whole empyrean shaking, ten thousand lightnings, etc.. there's nothing in anyone's lived experience that prepares us to picture thousands of giant beings throwing mountains at each other like pebbles - it stretches the imagination past its limits. the same thing holds for sounds in many cases - noises are depicted in PL that are so loud you can't really imagine them. this is part of how milton deals with the 'idolatry' problem - truth defies sensual grasp or representation. it does in spenser too but in a very different way

fine post, fine thread. nice to be able to return here and read an actual Veeky Forums thread top to toe that retains interest and stays on target.

I still kick myself sometimes for not picking this up at a secondhand book fair

>my wrestle cum tea party

these words in this order

Hah! Intended of course, user. That shmancy use of an all but archaic anglified latin prepositional form ('along with') is one i like to pull out.. whenever an opportunity presents itself.

*tips*

yeah, yeah

This post made me really want to stop being a pleb and read Pl, thanks user

glad my aim was true.

PL isn't even that long:

Jesus, you guys would fail miserably as teachers. There's a reason we don't teach like it's 1850. We know we can't just beat children over the head with classics and have them "learn." Think how hard it is to get the average middle schooler to engage with Shakespeare, let alone older authors. Kids, across the board, have gotten smarter, so don't give me that "ma negros and immugrunts iz polutin my genepool. Can't understand ma Milton." Reading classics IS comfy, but must be introduced slowly. Can't build a house roof-first.

The best thing a teacher can do is read it with the students not expect them to read it at home for homework. It would have made a difference for me, at least.

An odd comment. Have read 'classics' seriously from a young age without being led or driven to them, kind of picked up the habit on my own after developing a serious interest in books, basically because I liked reading so much. Was a really good athlete too (got almost a full ride for my sport) so I never received any shit for this. Continued on with my education and have never once felt the call to be either a teacher or even a coach.
Poetry really is a kind of spell cast on a young mind and a legitimate love exceptionally hard to articulate, so why bother? I'll talk to others who like it too, but feel no need to prosyletize.
Kids may be 'across the board' smarter today, certainly there are tests and a principle or two that tell (us) so. What this will boot the rising generation's anybody's guess. Not much, is mine.