While we are on Milton, I like to play my students the clip from _Animal House_ when Donald Sutherland (who plays the English Professor) says, "Frankly, I find Milton as boring as you do." It's wonderfully funny, and my students always disagree with him! They claim they find Milton anything but boring. (Maybe they are just trying to butter me up.)
Brad Tuggle
Instructor
Department of English
Spring Hill College
4000 Dauphin Street
Mobile, Alabama 36608
-----Original Message-----
From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List on behalf of Hannibal Hamlin
Sent: Fri 2/6/2009 11:53 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Neglecting Spenser
I too find Stephen Willett's points interesting and persuasive. But if we
take a larger historical perspective, surely interest in most authors and
works waxes and wanes? Milton seems now on the ascendent. Witness Nigel
Smith's Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare? I doubt Shakespeare will be
dislodged from his pre-eminent position as author of authors, but the fact
that a book with Smith's title has made such a splash is telling. I've
noticed myself how avidly students now respond to Milton (though I don't
have enough time in the classroom to say this is necessarily something new).
Why? Perhaps a return to religion (or actually just the same interest as
ever in places like where I teach -- Ohio). Perhaps Milton's engagement with
politics? His obvious self-absorption? (In these days of FaceBook.) In any
case, it's worth noting that Milton was once down and out after being
trashed by Eliot and others back when. Conversely, the New Critics were
crazy about Donne, who rocketed up in popularity. But then my sense is that
shares in Donne lost their value for a while. Now, I think, he's back or on
the way. As for Spenser, he's subject to the literary-critical market
(broadly speaking, dictated as much by general as academic readers) just as
any other author. My own thoughts are that he's suffered partly because of
his love of artificial form -- or, to put it another way, because of his
beauty. Beauty is not much in vogue now, alas (not that Milton isn't
beautiful, but I'm betting this is not part of Smith's argument). Of course,
Spenser is not just a pretty face. Anyone interested in politics, religion,
psychology, love and gender, etc., can find plenty to occupy them. But
perhaps if these are your primary (certainly only) interests, you might be
inclined to read elsewhere? It seems to me that what drew Keats, and Eliot,
and no doubt Stevens, to Spenser, was the beauty of his language, or,
shifting from schemes to tropes, the beauty of his conceits. A lesser poet
than Spenser who has suffered similarly is Thomas Campion. Believe it or
not, there used to be quite an interest in Campion. He even got his own
Oxford English Text edition, and there were loads of books and essays. No
more. The OET edition is long out of print, and, though I believe there was
once a plan for a new edition (by Catherine Ing?), I assume that's now
moribund. Could we make similar observations about Herrick? Pastoral as a
genre? Song?
Anyway, all this simply to say that the fluctuations of the literary market
have always been with us and always will be. This may be a good thing,
really. While we can lament the current Spenserian Downturn, we can also
hold onto our shares, ride out the recession, and work toward his recovery.
Hannibal
On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Anne Prescott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Just what I hope is a final thought/comment (from me, I mean). I'd like to
> report that this term I have taken on, in a addition to my two courses, an
> individual independent study for a grad student (she gets the points but it
> would not be like Columbia to, you know, like, do anything so vulgar as pay
> this Barnard professor extra). A whole term on Spenser, she begged. She's
> ecstatic as she reads him. All hope is not gone. The other thing that cheers
> me, aside from Spenser's appearance on Star Trek, is the number of brilliant
> young scholars in the field. The new Spenser Studies should be appearing
> almost literally any minute, and wow, are they good. Anne.
>
>
> On Feb 6, 2009, at 8:04 AM, Germaine Warkentin wrote:
>
> Stephen Willett's thoughts on the difficulty of getting the FQ onto
>> courses, and teaching it once it's on the list, impressed me greatly, and
>> not only because of what he said about Spenser, every word of which I agree
>> with. As I suppose many people on this list know, I've been retired now for
>> ten years, and so I'm not up to date on what's going on in the classroom.
>> But even before I retired I could see that a change was taking place,
>> creating a new kind of classroom in which I would never be able to work. I
>> taught a lot of theory in my day (some of it classes where Spenser was one
>> of the test cases) but I also taught Spenser to undergraduates, in the early
>> days books I-III and Mutabilitie, plus the Epthalamion and some sonnets.
>> That would sound like a pretty heavy load to today's young scholars. This is
>> not a rant, nor am I a laudator temporis acti. In fact, I am not even a real
>> Spenserian, though I've done a couple of good articles on him. I am just
>> worried about what the students are missing when they don't have that vast
>> luxurious poem to sink into, in the ways Stephen describes. Even more, I am
>> worried about the teachers who are missing the same experience. In my day I
>> heard a good deal of grousing from students who didn't want to read Paradise
>> Lost, and I told them firmly that reading PL was like going to the gym -- it
>> exercised every literary faculty they possessed, and taught the rest. They
>> didn't mind being told "it's good for you" -- they very intelligently wanted
>> to know why, so I showed them, year after year. It seems to me Stephen makes
>> a very fine, indeed a powerful, case for the Spenserian riches that are
>> there for both students and teachers -- to learn from and to be enjoyed.
>> Germaine.
>>
>> --
>> ***********************************************************************
>> Germaine Warkentin // English (Emeritus)
>> VC 205, Victoria College (University of Toronto),
>> 73 Queen's Park Crescent East, Toronto, Ont. M5S 1K7, CANADA
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>> "The primary rule of intellectual life: when puzzled, it never hurts to
>> read the primary documents" (Stephen Jay Gould)
>> ***********************************************************************
>>
>
--
Hannibal Hamlin
Associate Professor of English
The Ohio State University
Burkhardt Fellow,
The Folger Shakespeare Library
201 East Capitol Street SE
Washington, DC 20003
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