Wilson-Okamura, David Scott. Spenser’s International Style. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. xiv + 235 pp. ISBN: 9781107038202. $85.50 cloth.
Spenser’s International Style is a brilliant analysis of epic style from classical antiquity to the English Renaissance, with many contextualizing citations from Quintilian, Cicero, Dante, Petrarch, Du Bellay, Puttenham, and the 15th and 16th century Italian critics. Of great value are its comparative analyses of the great poets: Spenser with Virgil, Spenser with Ariosto and Tasso, Spenser with Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. A gifted linguist, the author works with Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso in Italian, Du Bellay in French, Virgil and many commentators in Latin, but graciously includes English translations.
Covering some of the same vast terrain as the author’s earlier Virgil in the Renaissance (CUP 2010), this impressive new study shows how Spenser shared with other major Renaissance poets (especially Ariosto, Tasso, Milton) a desire to imitate the authoritative grandeur of Virgil’s epic style, but with limited success. Since the Italian, French, and English vernaculars steadfastly resisted duplicating Virgil’s latinate “high style” for epic poetry, the poets devised substitutes for the sound of dactylic hexameter: stanzaic prosody (highly complex in Spenser’s case), archaic diction, copious rhetorical figures or “flowers” (especially gorgian tropes with an organizing symmetry like parison, parallelism, antithesis, homoeoteleuton), and, to convey the harshness of warfare, the wrenching intensity of double-consonant endings (a favorite feature of Tasso). Wilson-Okamura’s grasp of these rhetorical figures, along with outrageously clever strategies for teaching them to us his students, is one of his book’s greatest strengths.
Wilson-Okamura’s work is a sheer delight to read. Addressing key issues in the history of style, he formulates witty examples from ancient and modern culture that will engage scholars and newcomers alike. His signature device throughout the book is the pithy question, which serves as topic sentence and as challenging invitation to each mystery of style: Why use stanzas? Why is The Faerie Queene so flowery? Is it an epic at all, or a long string of lyrics? What is the middle style? Why isn’t The Faerie Queene overpowering like Paradise Lost?
Wilson-Okamura notes that Spenser’s stanzas differ significantly from the rapidly-moving ottavo rima stanzas of Ariosto and Tasso, and cites Thomas Greene’s fine account of the Spenserian stanza, stressing its complexity and closure, to which Wilson-Okamura adds many insights, often based on statistical analyses of the integrity of each Spenserian line and the dominance of rhyme. Two other aspects are omitted. Kenneth Gross notes that the alexandrine, instead of simply providing a definitive closure, also gives momentum into the next stanza.[1] A larger and more difficult consideration is the use of mystic numerology in Spenser’s stanza, as in his epic as a whole.[2]
Spenser’s International Style privileges Virgil as the touchstone for greatness in epic poetry. The categories for evaluating style (high, middle, low) and the terms for discussing these levels derive from Virgil’s three main works and from several millenia of exegesis (notably 15th - 16th century Italian critics), stressing the style pertaining to each of the three genres. Wilson-Okamura’s analysis of Virgil’s astonishing influence is invaluable to Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance scholars, and his appraisal of Virgil’s achievement also lays a basis for noting the Aeneid’s radical difference from the Renaissance romance-epics of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser, a difference not just in style but in the subject matter and purpose that each poet’s style conveys.
In a book of such ambitious scope there are inevitable gaps, questions not asked and generalizations that go beyond the evidence cited. Here are some reasons for caution.
(1) Severing Style from Purpose: Though Wilson-Okamura acknowledges the danger of treating style apart from subject and purpose (19), he sometimes does so, and this is especially problematic with regard to the complexities of Spenser’s epic. Using Virgil and Tasso as models, Wilson-Okamura believes the high style of epic requires a focus on full-scale warfare, but he views The Faerie Queene as written mainly in a middle style of love—charming digressions, polish, smoothness, sweetness, abundant figures of speech (“flowers”)—all owing to Spenser’s central aim of praising Elizabeth I, his most important reader. Wilson-Okamura does not fully consider the stylistic needs of Spenser’s quite different epic—a style which, to celebrate Elizabeth’s charisma, chastity, and providentially-inspired leadership of England as Gloriana, borrows not simply from Petrarch but indirectly from Petrarch’s source, Dante—a style allegorizing the virtues of human nature, overgoing Ariosto and Virgil in a multi-tiered inner war or psychomachia so impressive that Milton claimed Spenser as his progenitor, better than Aquinas, better than Virgil. Spenser’s moral and spiritual dimension begs comparison with the complexity of Dante, whose sweet new style (dolce stil nuovo) was perfected not just in love lyrics but above all in the Paradiso’s rising levels of divine love, ending with the great rose of light. Though Wilson-Okamura glances at the influence of Augustine, he does not fully examine the impact of Christian mystic vision on epic style, notably in the allegories of Dante, Langland, and Spenser. The most influential episodes of Virgil’s epic (a topic Wilson-Okamura deeply considers in chapters 5 and 6 of Virgil in the Renaissance) concern not warfare itself but Dido’s tragic love, Aeneas’s descensus ad inferos, and the final complex reactions to war. These most deeply affected the style and subject matter of Dante and Spenser, who extensively revised them for their own epic visions.
(2) Narrowly Defining “War”: Central to Wilson-Okamura’s argument is that epic’s high style, as established by the Iliad and the last half of the Aeneid, must depict warfare, but Spenser has written “The epic without war” (pp. 183-96), at least in the six completed books. That they focus mainly on single combats (like the pesky skirmishes of Irish colonial struggle), and that they serve, not the cultural authority of a Priam or Augustus, but “faithfull loues” (and behind those loves, the recondite mythic authority of Gloriana) generates only a middle style. Instead of evoking the harsh exaltation of war, Spenser enlists qualities of sweetness and ornamentation to integrate war with love-making—in keeping with his epideictic appeal to Elizabeth as Gloriana. But to limit Spenser’s epic to this political agenda (especially if narrowly conceived) is to miss his main subject, a moral and theological allegory depicting an inner warfare—paired intellectual psychomachias in Books I-II which ultimately condemn war (“blood can nought but sin,” I.x.55), except in opposing one’s own sins; paired passional psychomachias in Books III-IV, showing an ascendant female heroism; and paired sensate psychomachias in Books V-VI, showing horrific assaults against the sins of others. This schematic moral allegory treats war with a degree of complexity far beyond that of the Odyssey, Iliad, Aeneid, as well as Orlando Furioso and Gerusalemme Liberata. If Spenser in fact undertook such a complex moral and spiritual subject, a soul-warfare drawing from visionary fictions of Prudentius, Augustine, Dante, Bernard and other mystics, what style is appropriate? Can Spenser’s cornucopia of rhetorical flowers serve the high purposes of a sacred epic, rather than being merely ornaments for secular and political love? Moreover, does Spenser, in the course of the six legends, alter the style to show this “warfare” at different levels of the soul’s powers? In short, can we adequately discuss the style of an epic poem without fully defining the range of its subject matter and its essential purpose?—a daunting question with regard to Spenser’s half-finished epic.
Like Carol Kaske, Thomas Roche, and A. C. Hamilton, Wilson-Okamura puzzles over Spenser’s invoking of a “sacred Muse” before the Redcrosse knight’s climactic fight with the Great Dragon (I.xi.5-87).[3] As usual, he poses key questions: “First, what is the Muse’s ‘second tenor’? Second, who is ‘that … Paynim king’? And third, what could really be more exciting than a three-day dragon fight?” Wilson-Okamura seems correct in joining those who identify the “Paynim king” as Philip II of Spain (also shown as a “Souldan”), and equally correct in implying that there can be no greater warfare than Redcrosse’s three-day combat with the Great Dragon of Revelation. Why then does Spenser ask this holy muse, offspring of the Sun and Mnemosyne, to inspire him “gently” in a “second tenor”?—“O gently come into my feeble brest, / Come gently, but not with that mightie rage, / Wherewith the martiall troupes thou doest infest … / But now a while let downe that haughtie string, / And to my tunes thy second tenor rayse, / That I this man of God his godly armes may blaze” (I.xi.5-7). Carol Kaske’s note to these lines (I.xi.7) captures the paradox: Spenser disavows all pretension to an epic high style in depicting this apocalyptic combat, yet, at 55 stanzas, it is the poem’s “longest treatment of any battle” with an importance second to none. Thus the poet, like the protagonist, seeks to overcome pride, which in its many carefully specified and progressive forms is the great adversary in the Legend of Holiness. It is precisely this mystic dimension of Spenser’s epic (and of Dante’s) that subsumes and supersedes Virgil’s.
(3) Spenser’s limited realism: Based on a half-line of dying Amavia, Wilson-Okamura praises Spenser’s capacity for realistic dialogue (144-5, 156, 162). A more convincing case could be built on Susanne Wofford and Judith Anderson’s arguments for Britomart as The Faerie Queene’s best example of a genuine “character,” taking on a swelling life of her own that partly eludes Spenser’s intellectual control—in contrast to the predominance of figures heavily loaded with a wealth of sophisticated allegorical meanings.[4]
(4) Comparing passages out of context (92-93): Wilson-Okamura gives Milton the epic laurels for his high-style account of Satan’s titanic weaponry (Paradise Lost 1.283 ff), surpassing Spenser’s sweetly ornamental middle-style account of Redcrosse and Una escaping a storm by entering a worldly forest, a catalog of trees with quietly subtle moral implications (FQ 1.i.8). Apparently each passage is chosen as paradigmatic of the poet’s style, which one can analyze without regard for subject matter. Judging by these episodes, Spenser’s style is dominated by lengthy ornamental lists that often (as Paul Alpers stressed) engage readers rhetorically but do not engage the consciousness of the doctrinally-determined characters.[5] In contrast, Milton’s style builds on intense and extended expressions of consciousness, making lengthy epic similes and Ciceronian periods, strikingly different from Spenser’s closure after each line and after each stanza. But what happens if we examine style in closer relation to subject matter? Why not match Milton’s armed Satan with Spenser’s armed Arthur (I.vii.29-36)? Arthur’s iconic arms are not simply listed but are depicted rather like Satan’s, with a dynamism that invites us to imagine their use in action. And to convey this inner tension Spenser actually uses Tasso’s high-style device of double consonants (stanzas 31, 34). Likewise, we might compare Spenser’s view of the worldly forest with Milton’s depiction of Eden before (and after) the fall. Using similar events would provide a fairer basis for finding difference. Both comparisons would partly support Wilson-Okamura’s view of Spenser’s style as less dramatically engaging, as leaning toward a medieval thematic cataloging that shows the poet’s teeming and analytic mind more than his characters’ consciousness, but they also reveal that each poet’s style and aims are more ranging and complex than we thought when examining them apart from their specific subject matter.
What fascinates us about the style of Spenser’s complex fiction is how his intricate nine-line stanza organizes and momentarily stabilizes the world’s multiplicity, yet also exposes, with much sophisticated irony, the world’s questionable moral enterprises. Still more fascinating is that his intellectual focusing is expressed indirectly in suspenseful romance narratives, as well as in mythic tales of origin that arouse wonder at the poet’s immensely allusive erudition, making us work hard to attain the vision of human nature toward which Spenser’s genius leads us. To appreciate that depth of reading and its double focus, we must examine the poem’s style in relation to its changing subject matter, above all, the changing psychological level which each legend of virtue explores. It is only Wilson-Okamura’s occasional inattention to the complexity of Spenser’s subject matter—and to the quite different aims of Spenser’s allegorical epic in comparison to those of other epic poets—that keeps Spenser’s International Style from being an absolute classic. Northrop Frye said that he wrote Anatomy of Criticism while trying to decipher the generic complexity of The Faerie Queene.[6] David Wilson-Okamura’s exuberant and learned work will considerably enhance our ability to engage in that mystery.
Robert L. Reid
Emory and Henry College
[1] Kenneth Gross, “‘Each Heav’nly Close’: Mythologies and Metrics in Spenser and the Early Poetry of Milton,” PMLA 98.1 (Jan., 1983): 21-36.
[2] A. Kent Hieatt in Short Time’s Endless Monument: The Symbolism of the Numbers in Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion” (New York, 1960) discovers remarkable numerological complexity in Spenser’s metrics.
[3] See comments on I.xi.5-7 in The Faerie Queene, Book I, ed. Carol V. Kaske (Indianapolis / Cambridge: Hackett, 2006); Thomas P. Roche, Jr., “Spenser’s Muse,” in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989), 162-88; The Faerie Queene, 2nd ed., ed. A. C. Hamilton (Edinburgh Gate: Pearson / Longman, 2007).
[4] Susanne Lindgren Wofford, “Gendering Allegory: Spenser’s Bold Reader and the Emergence of Character in The Faerie Queene III,” Criticism 30 (1988): 1-21; Judith H. Anderson, “Britomart,” The Spenser Encyclopedia (U of Toronto P, 1990), 113-15.
[5] Paul J. Alpers, The Poetry of The Faerie Queene (Princeton UP, 1967), 3-35.
[6] Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (New York: Atheneum, 1966), vii.
43.3.54
Comments
The thesis of this book concerning the incompleteness of *The Faerie Queene* should be tested by reading John Donne's *Resurrection. Imperfect.* Like Book VII, Canto viii. Unperfite., both poems are finished and are concerned with unfinished time.
Link / ReplyLara M. Crowley writes (*John Done Journal*, Vol. 29, 2010, p. 187):
“Resurrection. Imperfect.” is perhaps the least studied of John Donne's divine poems because it has generally been perceived as an unfinished effort. But 'Resurrection. Imperfect.' is not incomplete. Rather, it is a finished poem concerned with unfinished time. Frost, like Frontain, declares, “the appearence of incompleteness is deliberate.”
“Resurrection. Imperfect.” ends with the Latin words “Desunt caetera.” Raymond-Jean Frontain writes about them and explains their meaning:
“Desunt caetera.”: the rest is lacking. Poetically, Donne's end lies in his beginning; the title is explained by the tag. The poem leads the reader to the point of revelation, only—as in the much-debated final episode of television's The Sopranos—to pass abruptly to black. The subject of the poem is what cannot be put into words, the soul's life once it is released from the body. It's a brilliant maneuver, and one thoroughly Donnean, to advertise that something is lacking in a poem that purports to celebrate the source of “all”; indeed, the very last phrase of the fragment proper is “of the whole.” Donne's Slinkey toy can never complete its walk downstairs, but must pause expectantly in mid-spring, un-done, or not-yet-done, in its anticipation of the All. “Resurrection, imperfect” reminds us that, in Donne, there is always something more.
Fowler's seven planetary week structure for the book, as well as Maurice Evans' statement that the book is finished, are for me the correct authorities on this issue.
In a book of such ambitious scope there are inevitable gaps, questions not asked and generalizations that go beyond the evidence cited.
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