About this Book

"The poetry of Edmund Spenser is coming to be seen as feisty and, for many critics, increasingly distant from the sycophantic affair described by political philosophers such as Karl Marx, who did not like Spenser, and cultural critics such as Stephen Greenblatt, who both did and did not. Marx saw nothing in Spenser but an 'arse-kissing poet,' while Greenblatt famously argued that the poetry's lush beauty is directly linked to its most violent engagements with colonialism. Spenser has long been seen as an appreciative consumer and purveyor of pat moral precepts and, what is more, a near prisoner of a belief in encomia and flattery as the means to elevate his poems' and his own prospects in the colonial and imperial milieu of Elizabethan England. He has been known to offer bouquets of rhetorical flowers to people in high places and, as the notoriously high number of dedicatory sonnets appended to the 'back matter' of the 1590 Faerie Queene suggests, even he could be embarrassed by the bounty of prospective dedicatees. But this is only part of the story of Spenser in his fierce negotiations with political authorities over the ownership of the poetic word. Literary critics do not go to political philosophers to understand the radical potential of poetic flowers or to reflect on the lives of flowers and floral emblems in ancient myth and verse. They do not do so because, as Elizabeth Fowler has pointed out, the boundaries among the disciplines of knowledge are harder to cross today than in Renaissance England"--