> Almost all of you will probably be able to remember what I have
> apparently lost from memory, viz. where to find the remark about
> Spenser's alexandrines that alludes to the Vergilian 'reaching to the
> further shore.' Of course it has to be in one of the great collections
> of responses to Spenser, but I have searched those and still can't find
> it. (So perhaps my eyes are going too.)
It's from George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody from the
Twelfth Century to the Present, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: Macmillan,
1923), pp. 366-67:
"The danger of the stanza—and the source of the dislike for it of shrewd
but prosaic critics—is its tendency to isolation, its apparent
suitableness rather to lyric than to narrative. This is especially
noticeable in the stanzas which close with a couplet...But the
Spenserian has nothing of this. Despite its great bulk and the
consequent facilities which [367] it offers for the vignetting of
definite pictures and incidents within a single stanza, the long
Alexandrine at the close seems to launch it on towards its successor
ripae ulterioris amore, or rather with the desire of fresh striking out
in the unbroken though wave-swept sea of poetry. Each is a great stroke
by a mighty swimmer: it furthers the progress for the next as well as
itself. And it is in this that the untiring character of the Faerie
Queene consists. I know of course that it has been the fashion to deny
this quality. But I say boldly that anybody who finds the Faerie Queene
wearisome either has not given it a fair trial, or was not in the vein
when he tried (which is much the same thing), or else has no real and
vital love for poetry as poetry--though what he will call ‘great
thoughts,’ or interesting stories, or unessential points of one kind or
another, may sometimes conciliate him thereto."
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Dr. David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [log in to unmask]
English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
East Carolina University Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet
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