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
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On Behalf Of David L. Miller
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2007 10:30 AM
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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)
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