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Whitman, Song of Myself. >>> [log in to unmask] 6/5/2007 9:18 PM >>> Sorry, David, I'm having a Seniors moment. What's your reference to "multitudes'? Ian -----Original Message----- From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David L. Miller Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2007 10:30 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Amoretti and Sonnets Regarding (a), I would urge you not to write Spenser off in these terms. He too contains multitudes, and in the Amoretti he is struggling with the tradition of love poetry differently, but no less gustily, than his precocious younger contemporary. >>> [log in to unmask] 6/5/2007 7:55 PM >>> I have been re-thinking my way through Spenser's Amoretti and Shakespeare's Sonnets. My interest at this time is not with FQ. I wonder how scholars on the List react to issues like these: (a) Amoretti can be interpreted as a game played between Elizabeth Boyle and the persona of the poet; the sequence remains strictly within the bounds of convention while promoting transcendence; it accepts a Platonist philosophy. Spenser is an abstractionist, an idealist, a Platonist. (b) Shakespeare's Sonnets promote an effect of reality (concreteness, materialism), are anti-convention, reject transcendence, and are anti-Platonist because Shakespeare likes the world as it is; he isn't an idealist. His Sonnets do not demonstrate that he has any idea of Platonism. (c) Is there any agreement that Shakespeare's Sonnets display a grasp of reality that we find in the mature dramas i.e. a sense of human drama, a representation of the action of thought, feeling, the same concrete grasp of human complexity that many of the plays (soliloquies in particular) do? Does this make him more realistic than Spenser? I'd welcome your thoughts and specific references if you have them to mind. I've been amazed at the in-depth knowledge you have about the FQ, Milton, and so on. Ian Lipke (University of Queensland, Australia)