John King definitely did not intend to be a guide on the matter of
Langland and Spenser; what I find interesting is that he once believed
(and may still believe) there is a strong connection between PP and FQ,
but he shies away from making that argument. My senses of "evidence,"
"historical" and "textual" are intentionally limited because I believe
there is a real distinction to be made between arguments based on
reasonably objective facts and arguments that are more subjective. If you
have records that a poet owned, read, and/or knew of a text, or if the
poet quotes lines from that text, obviously this gives you something that
generic similarities can't offer by themselves. This hardly means that I
think you can't make a plausible argument without evidence that Spenser
read Langland or borrowed some lines. As I suggested earlier, it may be
anachronistic and unhelpful to look for "Chaucer" and "Langland" (the
19th-20thC constructions we know) in Spenser. They were in some ways
indistinct parts of a single 'social text', especially when it came to
plaintive plowmen. -Dan Knauss
PS-Thanks to Bert Hamilton for the Crowley citation. I know I read a
review of the book in SCJ, but it's been successfully hiding from me.
On Mon, 5 Nov 2001 05:40:28 -0800 "Harry Berger, Jr."
<[log in to unmask]> writes:
> I guess I always thought that's what Anderson's The Growth of a
> Personal Voice, published in 1976, is about, but maybe I'm wrong.
> At
> any rate, I find myself still using it and learning from it. And I
> guess part of the question implied in your comments has to do with
> what you mean by "evidence" or whether "historical" and "textual"
> in
> the limited sense suggested by your context are the only forms of
> "evidence" relevant to your inquiry. What textual evidence and
> historical evidence mean, and how they mean, depend no less on a
> genre- and context-sensitive practice of close interpretation than
> does inquiry into the meanings of poetry. Anderson knows this, as
> her
> work from Growth through Words That Matter shows. For the kind of
> problem you're looking into, or for the kinds of problems that
> underlie it, I think that in general Anderson is a better guide
> than
> King, and I wouldn't place much weight on his dismissive comment,
> which does no justice at all to her contributions to this topic.
>
> Harry Berger Jr.
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