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The many substantive contributions to this thread have started all sorts of rabbits jumping. I'll try to catch just a couple here. One is that Spenser refers in many places to the notion, common among Platonists (some of them Christian), that our souls enjoyed life and consciousness before descent into bodies. So far as I know, there is no Biblical authority or teaching that would support this as an article of faith, but I don't believe it was ever condemned. So it figures in Spenser's fictive fabric in support of his idealizing tendency and heaven-determined destinies for certain characters; rhetorical distinctions between heaven and earth, soul and flesh, are almost unavoidable in the working out of such a fiction, and Spenser doesn't avoid the commonplaces, he only complicates them. I entirely agree with what Ken says, and I think the kinship between Spenser and Blake is strong, as he says. I would add Marvell to the picture, as a poet who worked in full consciousness with ideas and motifs that are latent, only hinted at, in Spenser. The poem that comes most vividly to mind (and only to mind, as I disposed of my Marvell before moving) is his dialogue between soul and body, in which each blames the other for its fallen state. I expect that Ken has uppermost in mind, as I do, the many enigmas and shifty references (typically both/and, dualistic only in the dynamics of cyclical movement) packed into the Garden of Adonis canto: every single image there is either contradicted or completed by another image in the vibrant pattern. Neither the circumstances in which Chrysogone conceives her twins nor the place where neo-natal Amoret is nurtured is corrupted by "sinful mire"; both halves of the canto show us life coming into being mysteriously (but naturally) as form-giving energy unites with "matter fit." Jon Quitslund -------------- Original message ---------------------- From: Kenneth Gross <[log in to unmask]> > > Whatever there is to say about Spenser's understanding -- through Paul -- > of the relations of the sinful body and the pure soul, as a poet he > clothed his spiritual particulars, his intuitions of disembodied thought > or being, in images of such fiercely driven nervously demonically embodied > activity and gesture that neither dualism nor monism quite work to > describe what he was doing. And he knew as well as Blake how dualisms are > turned to ugly ends.