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Spenser's Unwritten Poetics
by Roland Greene

The recent appearance of the treatise called The Model of Poesy by Thomas Wyatt’s great-grandson William Scott provokes me to return to a question I have sometimes pondered with my students: what is Edmund Spenser’s unwritten poetics?[1] All of us in this field are accustomed to dealing with the small and rather narrow canon of treatises on poetics that frame the Elizabethan period, from George Gascoigne’s Certain Notes of Instruction and Richard Willes’s De Re Poetica to George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie and Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy. Then there are the more occasional remarks in collections such as G. Gregory Smith’s Elizabethan Critical Essays and, almost a hundred years later, Brian Vickers’s Elizabethan Literary Criticism—both of them featuring anachronistic titles that speak to the ambiguous nature of this kind of writing, which is often not so much “critical” as idiosyncratic. We are familiar, perhaps overly so, with Gascoigne’s remarks on invention, Puttenham’s three books that might as well be different treatises, and now Scott’s remarks on sweetness.

Moreover, we know that many widely digested observations about contemporaneous poetry are found in poems and their paratexts, such as Sidney’s demonstration of not only the meter but the purpose of elegiac and Sapphic verses in the first Eclogues of his New Arcadia, or the inconclusive but searching conversation (“O pierlesse Poesye, where is then thy place?”) in “October” of The Shepheardes Calender.[2] As a discourse, sixteenth-century poetics is fugitive, equivocal, and miscellaneous. Sidney excepted, the major poets and even most of the minor ones managed not to write any declarative, explicit statements of poetics, likely because they saw no need to commit to writing what was a lively symposium across media, often concerned with particular poets as models, as much in conversation as in manuscript or print.[3] Still, we might well ask: if Spenser had written such a treatise, what would it have said?

In the short space of this lecture I aim to imagine the main factor in such an unwritten Spenserian poetics: an investment in poiesis, or the capacity of poetry to make its own world, as opposed to mimesis as the property of representing an extant reality; and one outcome of artifice within poiesis, according to which an abstract pattern can mean as much as—or more than—the verbal substance that realizes it. Over the years I have often observed that this factor exerts a force in Spenser’s poetics out of proportion to the critical energy that has been spent on explaining it. Much scholarship on The Faerie Queene, The Amoretti, The Shepheardes Calender, and other works addresses the symptoms of Spenserian poiesis without confronting the values in his poetics that generate these signs. It is more challenging to discuss the causes than the effects, to be sure; and for many of us the repercussions of what I am calling poiesis in Spenser’s poetry are conditions to be acknowledged more than engaged directly. Still, it might be worthwhile to spend a few minutes thinking together about an enduring condition of his poetics—and what amounts to an instigation to our own criticism and teaching. Hans Robert Jauss treats Leonardo da Vinci as we might consider Spenser, a practitioner who bequeathed little doctrine or method except “the implicit theory of his poietic praxis.”[4]

In the broader field of poetics, the term poiesis, derived from the infinitive poiein (meaning “to make form”), is a token of a longstanding but often submerged conversation on the claims of imitation (mimesis) and making (poiesis).[5] The former understands poetry as the representation of given reality, the latter as creating a new reality, two programs that appear sometimes as complementary, sometimes as opposed in their interlaced history that begins with Plato and draws authority from Aristotle.[6] In the Renaissance, while mimesis takes primacy, the counter-tradition of poiesis, despite lacking a categorical spokesman in antiquity, proved a durable corrective.[7] As Jauss argues,

The idea of man as a second creator, which was derived from poetry and hermetic writings, caused mathematics to be understood as a man-made conceptual world (“scientia mentis, quae res facit,” science of the mind which makes things). Pico della Mirandola defined man as “sui ipsius quasi—plastes et factor” (a sort of molder and fashioner of his own self) who, in an intermediate position between divine perfection and animal limitation, intellect and sensuality, is himself to produce the form of his life. And Scaliger elevated the poet above all other artists because, as a second god, he could create a second nature, in a manner of speaking: “poeta et naturam alteram et fortunas plures etiam ac demum sese isthoc perinde ac Deum alterum efficiet” (The poet fashions a second nature and many fortunes, even to the point of making himself in this way a second God, Poet 1.1). But these declarations of a new creative consciousness encountered ontological barriers which were not removed by philosophy until Leibniz… .

Renaissance poetics did not take this final expectable step toward autonomous art which would have required a complete break with imitatio naturae.[8]

Mimesis and poiesis together are the aspects of a fiction-oriented position in poetics, as distinct from a view that treats the poet as prophet or seer, or as a vessel for divine inspiration, or as the transcendent voice of the age. When we peel apart these two kinds of making, mimesis stands for classical authority around socially accountable fiction, while poiesis stands for claims about the direct power of poetry—what Giorgio Agamben calls “pro-duction into presence”—that can nonetheless be problematic on social, political, and theological grounds.[9]

The leading Elizabethan voice for poiesis is Puttenham, who begins the Arte of English Poesie with these words: “a poet is as much to say as a maker.”[10] Puttenham’s treatise is a sustained exploration of poiesis in history and society, on the plane of the page, and in figurative language. While Puttenham offers many unavoidable concessions to mimesis, the arguments in the Arte for poetry’s primacy among the human arts and sciences and its antiquity as a factor in religion and culture are probably the effect of his having to develop a coherent account of poiesis without a comprehensive classical model in the way that Sidney depends on the recent translators of Aristotle. The Defense of Poesy is the counterpart of the Arte as a position-paper in favor of mimesis; but even here the young poet betrays signs of the intellectual pressure that must have been brought by those members of his generation who favored a justification for poetry based on poiesis: what better explains the conceit of the golden world, a more-than-mimetic claim that shades into the poietic? I read these two theorists of poetics who are often paired and sometimes contrasted as demonstrating complementary registers of a conversation that was going on around them, Puttenham oriented toward poiesis and Sidney toward mimesis, but each granting recognition to the other position.[11]

You will have seen where this argument is going: to ask how Spenser’s practice, and his fleeting statements about poetics, figure in this conversation. Let me pose a provocative question: is Spenser profitably understood as a mimetic poet? From his formal debut in 1579, he seems to go out of his way to demonstrate and sometimes announce a poetics in which representation of action or even of virtue is complicated, layered, even perhaps exfoliated out of relevance, permitting a making—of action or virtue, of perspectives, finally of the poem—to take its place. In part this reflects the nature of allegory, of course, but Spenser often seems to ensure that the search for a consistent mimetic referent beneath the allegory will be frustrated.[12] Consider the tactics by which, in the notes to The Shepheardes Calender, mimesis is disabled in favor of other kinds of making or fashioning: E.K. tends to explain characters either in terms of the precedent for their appearance (Roffy is “the name of a shepehearde in Marot his Æglogue of Robin and the Kinge”);[13] or in the light of an assigned meaning that gains in complexity as it is explained (for example, the note in “May” that begins “Great Pan … is Christ, the very God of all shepheards” and continues to gloss the name by following it through classical and Christian commentary until we have about 320 words of gloss for two words out of a 320-line eclogue);[14] or, finally, in terms of a meaning both proposed and withdrawn, as in notorious notes like this: “I doubte whether by Cuddie be specified the authour selfe, or some other. For in the eyght Æglogue the same person was brought in, singing a Cantion of Colins making, as he sayth. So that some doubt, that the persons be different.”[15] All of these tactics mean that mimesis as commonly understood gets compromised and perhaps reimagined in the poem: characters become names on the one hand or anthologies on the other, but they are not person-representations who commit actions in the manner of fiction. In principle the poem imitates many things, from social conflicts to persons to their songs and speech, but the intervention of the notes is to disrupt this imitation at the point where a reader asks “what does this mean?” and once E.K.’s answers have registered we can hardly think of imitation again.

I need not dwell on how this revision of the received notion of mimesis is continued and developed in The Faerie Queene, now with the trained reader in the role of E.K. The epic includes many disclaimers about the failures of mimesis and the corresponding prospects of another kind of art: consider the remarks about the fatal limitations of “pourtraict” in the Proem of Book III, which are complemented by the narrator’s false humility over his own verse made of “mirrours more then one.”[16] While custom encourages us to treat such passages as instances of the modesty topos or similar conventions, the broader context of Spenserian poetics suggests that something more is in play, a mise-en-texte that proposes its own version of reality, not imitating but “fashion[ing],”[17] not feigning but made through “workmanship.”[18] I venture that the Spenserian corpus is a sustained experiment in a nominal mimesis ruled by the animating force of poiesis, and that the proof of that condition is in how much of our critical activity concerns the poietic elements that tend to be observed but only intermittently theorized in the treatises of the time.

I have already mentioned that term “workmanship,” which matters a great deal to Spenser. Since it shadows several properties in his work, let me use it to conduct us to a further element of his poetics I want to notice. This is a property of his poiesis that makes his poems stand out from a survey course and often frustrates general interpretations. How should I put this? In most of Spenser’s work, where something occurs in an abstract position within a structure is as important as what occurs; organization complements but more often controls substance; and he is willing to write lines, stanzas, and more that exist to realize a pattern. Of course a considerable share of European poetry starting with the Occitan troubadours and Dante is written to fill a pattern of one sort or another: what is the difference, we might ask, between Petrarch’s tinkering with the calendrical order as well as the corresponding language of the poems in the Canzoniere and Spenser’s provision of a similar pattern in the Amoretti?[19] Such abstract patterns realize poiesis, often (as in the Canzoniere) in productive tension with mimesis; but when, as usually in Spenser, the prevalence of pattern and other kinds of artifice compels exclusive attention to the poem not as the record of a lived experience but as a concrete object, poiesis comes to dominate. And a poem that shows poiesis in uncompromising action will likely be read differently from one where mimesis controls poiesis: it may seem factitious more than human, or reducible to its patterns, or simply resistant to conventional interpretation. Everyone who teaches Spenser’s poetry to undergraduates recognizes that a certain sort of reading for pattern and artifice must be inculcated somehow. In this regard Spenser has a surprising affinity with a twentieth-century experimental poet like Jackson Mac Low, who writes according to aleatory methods. I have sometimes encouraged students to put a Spenser sonnet alongside one of Mac Low’s, say from the French Sonnets, a collection in which the poet “looked up each word of [a chosen] Shakespeare sonnet in the English-French section” of a random dictionary “and replaced it with the headword of the column in which it appears.” Thus the first line of Sonnet 18 becomes “Shamefulness Hymn companionableness thanksgiver tissue a summer-wheat’s dead?”[20] 

In Spenser’s sonnets, such as one of the Amoretti that precedes Easter, we might say, how is its substance determined by an abstract calendrical position that exists outside the poem? How does pattern generate language to produce poiesis? A sonnet of the Amoretti depends on received, naturalized patterns like the Christian calendar, the seasons, and the virtues, while Mac Low improvises patterns such as random books and aleatory methods, but the fundamental value—of artifice that activates poiesis—is held in common. In encouraging students to accommodate this sort of workmanship in Spenser’s poetry, I have found, it serves sometimes to use unconventional approaches.

Two or three brief examples will represent Spenser’s investment in poiesis through pattern. Recently I have written about The Fowre Hymnes as confronting the difficulty of representing divine presence.[21] Spenser’s solution is not so much a sequence in any narrative sense as a set of hymn-versions in which each installment exposes the limits of the preceding one—an epanorthosis writ large.[22] The first of the series, “An Hymne in Honovr of Love,” exposes its own limitations by transposing Petrarchan and Neoplatonic love lyric into the genre of hymn, which produces a fatally flawed hymn. The next episode in the series, the “Hymne in Honovr of Beavtie,” implicitly concedes the shortcoming of the preceding hymn by adopting a different object and an alternate route to the realization of its genre, namely the praise of the divine; but this hymn soon delivers its own faulty conclusions, which no reader would accept in any other Spenserian setting: 

Therefore where euer that thou doest behold

A comely corpse, with beautie faire endewed,

Know this for certaine, that the same doth hold

A beauteous soule, with faire conditions thewed,

Fit to receiue the seede of vertue strewed. (134-38) [23] 

The two remaining poems of the series, “An Hymne of Heavenly Love” and “An Hymne of Heavenly Beavtie,” track the language and thought of their corresponding forerunners, but now with a proper understanding of key terms (grace, immortality, glory) and of the hymnic machinery that finds a purpose for them. As I have written, Spenser’s series shows the making of the Renaissance hymn as both a problem and a project, offering us lovely poems such as the hymns in honor of love and beauty only to discredit them in sequence. Where the epanorthosis is calibrated at the level of the entire hymn to be shown as damaged, the poet’s conviction that a later poem will convincingly replace another may seem rash or risky. We might observe a similar principle at work in Amoretti 35 and 83, which are the same except for one word in the sixth line: in Sonnet 35, as eyes gaze on the object of their desire, “having it, they gaze on it the more,” while “seeing it, they gaze on it the more” in 83.[24] Apart from the moral contrast implied between having and seeing—and it is implied rather than shown, because carried only in two words—the two sonnets together seem to challenge us to remember that they demonstrate only a more extreme version of the patterning of nearly every poem in the Amoretti. Now that you have admitted 35 and 83 as counterparts whose language is shaped in response to one another at a remove of nearly fifty sonnets, can you read other long-distance counterparts the same way? If the reader accepts this challenge, Spenser seems to say, she or he understands a central tenet of a poetics in which pattern matters as much as substance, in fact where pattern is indistinguishable from substance.

The Faerie Queene turns away from figures like epanorthosis or redundancy, in which lines and stanzas are written to be cancelled or written again. Instead, and I am speaking only what everyone knows, the provision of narrative in Spenser’s epic demands that the objectification of the verse be subordinated to temporality. After all, concreteness works differently in narrative than in lyric. Now Spenser develops the sort of pattern that works through placedness: a character such as the weeping Squire of Book V, canto i is introduced in unlucky stanza 13, as Heather James reminded us in last year’s Maclean Lecture, while set pieces such as the House of Pride or the Bower of Bliss unfold in a fashion that confirms the artifactuality of the verse that represents them.[25] Moreover, duration, extent, and pace come to stand for a specifically narrative poiesis. Compression and dilation carry meaning. An episode such as that of Furor and Occasion in Book II, canto iv embodies a rhythm of experience and reflection, for instance where the “handsome stripling” Phedon (3.7) takes eighteen stanzas (16-33) to relate his tale of “wrath” and “gealosie” but the Palmer needs only eighteen lines (34-35) to treat his condition.[26] Characters are named long after they are introduced, not for the sake of suspense but because the naming fulfills a pattern when it comes, as Phedon’s naming is “the sign of his restored humanity.” [27] There are countless examples in The Faerie Queene of this kind of poiesis through pattern—of where something occurs in the narrative, and for how long, and in proximity to what—for it is as much a part of the allegorical procedure as the etymology of names and the iconography of description.

As we know but too seldom acknowledge, Spenser’s poetics reflects the ferment around poiesis that marked his era. If he sought to demonstrate how poiesis can overwrite mimesis, he envisioned that program by making the artifice of the poem its own reality principle, rendering the text concrete as it becomes shaped, revised, and distorted under our eyes. Spenser’s poiesis is what makes comparison with Ovid, Ariosto, or Camões feel provisional regardless of how closely we connect him to them through ideas or motifs. It is how his work converses with, but finally differs from, his English contemporaries such as Sidney and Walter Ralegh. It is what he would have declared in his unwritten, and unnecessary, treatise on poetics.

Roland Greene
Stanford University



[1] William Scott, The Model of Poesy, edited by Gavin Alexander, Cambridge UP, 2013.

[2] Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, edited by Albert Feuillerat, vol. 1, Cambridge UP, 1912, p. 563, Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), edited by Victor Skretkowicz, Cambridge UP, 1987, p. 488, Edmund Spenser, Works: A Variorum Edition, edited by Edwin Greenlaw et al., vol. 8, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1932-49, p. 98. 

[3] The present essay shares this premise with a train of old and new scholarship, including Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., U of Chicago P, 1961, Roland Greene, “Lyric,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume Three: The Renaissance, edited by Glyn P. Norton, Cambridge UP, 1999, pp. 216-28, and David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style, Cambridge UP, 2013.

[4] Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, translated by Michael Shaw, U of Minnesota P, 1982, Theory and History of Literature 3, p. 51.

[5] A summary of the history of the term poiesis can be found in Stathis Gourgouris, “Poiesis,” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman et al., 4th ed., Princeton UP, 2012, pp. 1071-72.

[6] E.g. Symposium 205b-c, Nicomachean Ethics 1140a, Metaphysics 1025b; Poetics 1451b. On poiesis as the larger category, see Paul Woodruff, “Aristotle on Mimesis,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, edited by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, Princeton UP, 1992, pp. 73-95, esp. p. 81.

[7] The essays in Poiesis and Modernity in the Old and New Worlds, edited by Anthony J. Cascardi and Leah Middlebrook, Hispanic Issues, vol. 39, Vanderbilt UP, 2012, propose to document a “range of imaginative and creative discursive activity” in Early Modern Europe and America that might go under the name of poiesis; the editors claim, oddly, that “the term poiesis was not itself a part of early modern vocabularies” (xi, x).

[8] Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeuneutics, translated by Shaw, pp. 51-52.

[9] Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, translated by Georgia Albert, Stanford UP, 1999, p. 70. Agamben’s essay “Poiesis and Praxis,” pp. 68-93, explores the relation between poiesis and praxis (from prattein, “‘to do’ in the sense of acting,” p. 68) from Aristotle to Nietzsche.

[10] George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, edited by Frank Whigham and Wayne Rebhorn, Cornell UP, 2007, p. 93.

[11] My essay of twenty years ago, “Fictions of Immanence, Fictions of Embassy,” in The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World, edited by Elizabeth Fowler and Roland Greene, Cambridge UP, 1997, pp. 176-202, addresses this contrast from a related vantage.

[12] This observation is often implicit in Spenserian criticism of the classic era such as A. C. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene, Clarendon P, 1961, and Paul J. Alpers, The Poetry of The Faerie Queene, Princeton UP, 1967. Hamilton and Alpers, with Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse, The Johns Hopkins UP, 1981, cover much of the ground of the present talk in their own terms derived, respectively, from Northrop Frye, the New Criticism, and post-structuralism.

[13] Spenser, Works, edited by Greenlaw et al., vol. 7, p. 93.

[14]  Spenser, Works, edited by Greenlaw et al., vol. 7, p. 55.

[15] Spenser, Works, edited by Greenlaw et al., vol. 7, p. 99.

[16] Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, edited by A. C. Hamilton, Longman, 1977, pp. 304-05, III.1.3, 3.7, and 5.6.

[17] Spenser, “A Letter of the Authors,” Appendix I to The Faerie Queene, edited by Hamilton, p. 737.

[18] On workmanship in The Faerie Queene, see Jon A. Quitslund, Spenser’s Supreme Fiction: Platonic Natural Philosophy and The Faerie Queene, U of Toronto P, 2001, p. 142.

[19] Two studies by Thomas P. Roche, Jr. are germane: “The Calendrical Structure of Petrarch’s Canzoniere,” Studies in Philology, vol. 71, 1974, pp. 152-72, and Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences, AMS Press, 1989, pp. xii-xv.

[20] Jackson Mac Low, French Sonnets, Membrane P, 1989.

[21] “Elegy, Hymn, Epithalamion, Ode: Some Renaissance Reinterpretations,” in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Volume 2 (1558-1660), edited by Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 321-28.

[22] David Lee Miller, “Fowre Hymnes and Prothalamion (1596),” in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, edited by Richard A. McCabe, Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 293-313, observes that the sequence of the hymns is based on Petrarch’s revisionary Trionfi. Miller queries Spenser’s “retractation” of his first two hymns in his dedication and the “Hymne of Heavenly Love” 8-22, p. 294.

[23] Spenser, “An Hymne in Honovr of Beavtie,” in Works, edited by Greenlaw et al., vol. 7, p. 208.

[24] Roche, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences, xiv-xv, and my “Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595),” in The Oxford Handbook of Spenser, edited by McCabe, pp. 263-64. What I call there the “self-contained weave of words and figures” in the Amoretti anticipates the argument of the present talk.

[25] Heather James, “The Problem of Poetry in The Faerie Queene, Book V,” Spenser Review, vol. 45, no. 1, Spring-Summer 2015, http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/item/45.1.1/

[26] Alpers, The Poetry of The Faerie Queene, pp. 54-69, follows this episode’s adaptation of its source in Orlando Furioso.

[27] Alpers, The Poetry of The Faerie Queene, 69.  

Comments

  • Ricardo Mena Cuevas 7 years, 10 months ago

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46.1.1

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Roland Greene, "Spenser's Unwritten Poetics," Spenser Review 46.1.1 (Spring-Summer 2016). Accessed March 28th, 2024.
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