On Feb 5, 2009, at 12:06 AM, Michael Saenger wrote:
  
>> Perhaps it would be easier to determine who, among poets in English  
>> after Spenser, was *not* influenced by him.

LYRIC POETRY:  The question "Who knows not Colin Clout?" can often be 
answered "Who does?"   Marianne Moore’s "Spenser’s Ireland," "the greenest 
place I’ve never been," might be construed to mean "the greatest poet I’ve 
never read," though she knows about the Vewe from a footnote in Maria 
Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent.  The lintel at the entry to the bedchamber of 
Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House is carved with "Sleep after toil…" and his wife 
was named Oona. The preference of my teacher Robert Lowell for Milton 
reminds us that the New Critics who taught him were much fixed on "Lycidas" 
– the original draft for "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" has the same 
number of lines.  (Yet Lycidas may get some of the resonance of its refrain 
"Lycidas is dead" from Spenser’s "Philisides is dead," and the memorable 
question, "What boots it with incessant care?" comes pretty directly from 
The Teares of the Muses [just as "old Damoetus" comes from Sidney’s "old 
Languet"].)  Gordon Teskey’s version of allegory in his book on that 
putatively strained mode may revive some of Allen Tate’s strictures against 
it (and against Spenser) as evincing a will-to-power abstractionism – or 
will to dominate – then found soon after Spenser in Galilean Science: 
 though this connection is not bruited or reported in the more recent 
critic.

When, to confirm Spenser’s being out of poetical fashion--and anything but 
"a text we should be born that we might read"--we have recourse to the 
modern and modernist-influenced teaching anthologies, where the emphasis is 
fairly inevitably on lyric utterance ((Poe having said the long poem cannot 
be written at all)), and where Spenser is represented scantily, if at all. 
 He appears merely as a reference for assonance in X.J. Kennedy’s 
Introduction to Poetry; in Hugh Kenner’s Art of Poetry two pieces are given, 
one to illustrate that Spenser’s Rose Song (FQ II.xii) is hardly sing-able, 
and the other to illustrate that Willy and Perigot’s roundelay is not 
genuine folk poetry, or authentically naïve. John Frederick Nims’ Western 
Wind: An Introduction to Poetry gives Spenser a single sonnet (LXXV). Brooks 
& Warren’s Understanding Poetry, my text in high school, ends with Keats’ 
"Ode on a Grecian Urn," which itself ends with "all ye need to know," but 
Spenser is not included.  Huntington Cairns’ ambitious Limits of Art 
(another of my books from back then) offers no Spenser, presumably on the 
grounds that nobody was found who had said anything sufficiently laudatory 
or over-the-top about him for that volume’s critical quotations feature. 
 Exceptions: Louis Simpson’s An Introduction to Poetry gives the entire 
Epithalamion. The 2nd edn. of The Norton Introduction to Poetry, ed. J. Paul 
Hunter (1981), gives five sonnets as well as the "Prothalamion."

Spenser appears as the colonialist in/from the Vewe in Seamus Heaney’s "Bog 
Oak," and Louis MacNeice’s admiration of -- and indebtedness to Spenser for 
-- the poetical technique of particularized abstraction has been elegantly 
set forth by Richard Danson Brown’s "MacNeice in Fairy Land" in J.B. 
Lethbridge, Edmund Spenser:  New and Renewed Directions.  Just as Colin 
Clout’s musical instrument may well be present in MacNeice’s poem’s title 
"Bagpipe Music," (a favorite poem of mine in high school) so Colin’s poem 
"January" may be part of the inspiration for the wintery first piece in John 
Crowe Ransom’s The Manliness of Men, with a Rosalind-type representing the 
femininity and abiding memory of the other sex.  But as these two examples 
show, the question of who knew Spenser after 1930 is only partly answerable 
by academic Spenserians, (Spenser having become the professors’ poet from 
having been the poet’s poet) because the professors bring to the seminar 
table their own knowledge of what a given text surely ought to have known. 
 An example that comes to my mind is the opening of the 3rd  section of 
Wallace Stevens’ "Credences of Summer" (1946), which must sound to us like a 
Dante-inflected gloss on Mt. Acidale and the line quoted from Marianne 
Moore:

It is the natural tower of all the world,
The point of survey, green’s green apogee,
But a tower more precious than the view beyond,
A point of survey squatting like a throne,
Axis of everything, green’s green apogee

And happiest folk-land, mostly marriage-hymns.
It is the mountain on which the tower stands,
It is the final mountain.
…
This is the refuge that the end creates.

(Similarly, "The Plot against the Giant" – the giant I think being a florist 
coming into his cutting garden – seems to me to be hatched by the charming 
and blooming Euphrosyne, Aglaia, and Thalia, who hale from the same Ficinian 
locus amoenus; they are three flowers.) The poetry of my learned offspring 
Peter is not obviously Spenserian, and yet I know he had to write verses a 
decade ago in Spenser’s style for John Hollander’s course;  I believe his 
concerned the three "Re" brothers Alpha, Beta, and Gamma.

PROSE FICTION (& CINEMA):  The first Star Wars film has Obi-Ben-Kenobi (is 
that right?) disappear in combat like Orgoglio, and features a dwarfish 
Droid whose appellation is short for android, as Spenser’s Dony is short for 
Adonis. I.e., Lukas ought to have read Spenser, but the secular scripture in 
general has probably done it for him (and the Japanese movie that was his 
actual inspiration).  Ditto Talus and Robocop.  George Grella, with whom I 
was in seminar in Gambier in 1959, wrote an early article for The Nation (I 
think) identifying James Bond as a dragon-slayer in the line of Spenser’s 
hero; Parker’s detective story pedigree must surely include Ian Fleming’s 
spy stories?  The second chapter of Dr. No, "Choice of Weapons," needs to be 
read with Erich Auerbach’s chapter in Mimesis, "The Knight Sets Forth," and 
at one point rather later we hear Bond thus:  "‘It’s like this.  I’m sort of 
a policeman.  They send me out from London when there’s something odd going 
on somewhere in the world that isn’t anybody else’s business’ … Bond told 
the story in simple terms, with good men and bad men, like an adventure 
story of a book."  And see this from the chapter called "The Thing," which 
is swamp-thing:  "Half a mile away, coming across the lake, was a shapeless 
thing with two glaring orange eyes with black pupils.  From between these, 
where the mouth might be, fluttered a yard of blue flame.  The grey 
luminescence of the stars showed some kind of a domed head above two short 
batlike wings.  The thing was making a low moaning roar that overlaid 
another noise, a deep rhythmic thud.  It was coming towards them at about 
ten miles an hour, throwing up a creamy wake."  Bond reassures his 
associate, "you can forget about dragons," but thinks "Have to fight it 
here.  What’ll its weak spots be?  The drivers. … I’ll go for its headlights 
… Must have some kind of giant tyres … I’ll go for them too."  Elsewhere we 
learn that Bond is a member of the Order of St. George.  (Cp. U. A. 
Fanthorpe, "Not My Best Side," on Paolo Uccello’s S. George and the Dragon, 
National Gallery: "I have diplomas in Dragon / Management and Virgin 
Reclamation.  … Don’t you want to carry out the roles / That sociology and 
myth have designed for you?" [= III: voice of the young hero, whom the lady 
and the dragon have to go along with].)  C.S. Lewis’ Mr. Tumnus gets his 
name from a comparison of Milton’s Satan with Eve to Vertumnus with Pomona 
in PL IX, but The Silver Chair’s title surely partly refers to that same 
enchanted object in the "underland" recesses of Mammon’s Cave, since it too 
is chair of remembering and forgetting and underworld bondage ("‘Ah,’ he 
groaned.  ‘Enchantments, enchantments … the heavy, tangled, cold, clammy web 
of evil magic.  Buried alive.  Dragged down under the earth, down into the 
sooty blackness … how many years is it?  Have I lived ten years, or a 
thousand years, in the pit?’"  The speaker is bound to the chair.)  The 
title of Michael Moorcock’s Gloriana, or The Unfulfill’d Queen (1978) tells 
us that it is the work of a frustrated pro-romance anti-Spenserian (in the 
line of Mervyn Peake and his Gormenghast trilogy).  The Gloriana in question 
is actually an Acrasian type, and her Capt. Arturo (Quire – as in Squire?) 
is into espionage and assassination (cp. Sp's Arthur in bad company).  -- 
Jim N.

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James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121