p.347: We know Edmund Spenser (1522-99) as a man less well than we know Sidney; and probably, as a man, he was less worth knowing. He developed more slowly. Sidney's work rises out of the contemporary Drab almost like a rocket rises: Spenser climbed out slowly and painfully, lik Christian from the slough. His work has, nevertheless, excited a wider and more enduring interest. It has perhaps more commerce than Sidney's with our subconscious and semi-conscious minds; probes deeper. That may be his compensation for being a more ordinary man, less clever, less easily articulate. Here, as often, defects and virtues are closely connected. His not infrequent dullness and flatness may owe something to that same simplicity and quietness of mind which give his great passages their peculiar depth and, as it were, rectitude. We fell that they could not have been otherwise, that nothing has been merely 'made up'. p.355: A full account of Spenser's reading would perhaps illuminate his work more than an account of his friendships. But it is not very easy to be sure what he had read. He was not an exact scholar, and his mind was so concoctive and esemplastic that the fruits of his reading met and mingled and transformed one another till they became unrecognizable -- as happens on the 'road to Xanadu'. If Phaedrus and Phaedo and Xenophon and Cicero are all confused in a single passage (F.Q., iv, Prol. iii), as one scholar maintains, we cannot thence conclude with certainty that he had never read Plato. [...] Aristotle's _Ethics_ I think he had read - or as the schoolboys say 'done' - probably with much help from a Latin version, but it was clearly not one of the books he had lived with. The Bible and the commoner classics we may take for granted; and with them masses of neo-Latin - Pico, Ficino, Plaingenius, Erasmus, Natalis Comes, Bodinus, Sannazarus, Buchanan. It is in that direction that his reading often goes beyond ours. Marot and the Pleiade he knew well. The great, lifelong influences upon him were the Bible, Ovid, Boiardo, and Ariosto. From the two last he derived almost exclusively his conception both of romantic matter and romantic method, though he seems also to have looked at _Arthur of Little Britain_ and some metrical romances. Chaucer and pseudo-Chaucer were less important to him than he himself liked to believe. Of Malory he made extraordinarily little use; I shall suggest a reason for this below. p. 358: [...] It will be seen that very few of Spenser's works indicate the interests, or the powers, which were his at the moment of publication. It will also be seen how profoundly right the common reader has shown himself in regarding Spenser almost exclusively as the poet of the _Faerie Queene_. Almost everything else he did was something of a digression. All his life he was in a position of a painter who, while engaged on some great work, frequently has visitors in his studio. They have to be entertained (it is his only chance as a man, if not as an artist) with anything he can lay his hands on. Old canvases that he himself cares nothing about will be brought forward. Worse still, they must be shown the great work itself in various stages of incompleteness. This helps to explain the extraordinary disparity in value between the _Faerie Queene_ and nearly all the minor poems. Virgil without the _Aeneid_, Milton without the _Paradise Lost_, Goethe without _Faust_, would still rank as great poets. But if Spenser were shorn of the _Faerie Queene_, though the _Epithalamium_ (perhaps truncated) would appear in anthologies, the rest of his work would be known only to professional scholars. Even as things are, it is perhaps read by hardly anyone else. [... the following quote is from a long discussion of _Shepherd's Calendar_ - AV] p. 363: Of the _Shepherd's Calendar_ as poetry we must frankly confess that it commits the one sin for which, in literature, no merits can compensate: it is rather dull. It would be interesting to know whether a hundred people (or ten) not officially connected with English studies have read it in the last fifty years. I have never in my life met anyone who spoke of it in tones that betray real enjoyment. Nothing at all is gained by talking as if it were comparable in value to the best, or even the second best, of Sidney's poetry. The fables in _February_ and _May_ are told not badly: that is as far as praise of them can extend. The roundelay in _August_ goes with a swing, but much real popular poetry, even in hat century, had been better. The real merit of the _Calendar_ lies in achieving more often and keeping up for longer stretches the easy, liquid movement which Gascoigne sometimes just reached. Lines like The blossome which my braunch of yout hdid beare, With breathed sighed is blown away and blasted, or Whence is it, that the flowret of the field doth fade And lyeth buryed long in Winters bale? are not much in themselves. But they are the medium in which much can be done. In _December_ there are beautiful metrical audacities, not to be confused with the joltings of his _February_, , , , , , All was blowne away of the wavering wynd or , , , , , Gather ye together my little flocke But Spenser was soon to write and had perhaps already written poetry which deprives the _Calendar_ of all importance. p. 393: What, then, should be our final judgement of Spenser? That question is, in one sense, unanswerable; in another, almost too easy to be worth asking. Among those who shared, or still share, the culture for which he wrote, and which he helped to create, there is no dispute about his greatness. He never, while that culture lasted, suffered any eclipse comparable to that which Donne suffered in the eighteenth century, or Pope in the nineteenth. There are only minor fluctuations in his fame. Even for Rymer he is among the men "whose intellectuals were of so great a making" that they may outlast "founders of empires". Even Dryden acknowledges that "no man was ever born with so great a genius". Pope imitated him as if he were an ancient. Within the older English tradition he is only less secure and central than Shakespeare and Milton. But of course this gives us no assurance that he will be mentioned a hundred years hence. His world has ended and his fame may end with it. To attempt an agreed estimate across the chasms that have now opened would be futile. There may - or may not - come a time when the culture for which Spenser wrote and the culture which is now replacing it can be compared, by men to whom English is a dead language, as coolly as we now compare two periods of ancient Egyptian history. At present it is not possible. We can only say that those who in any degree belong to the old culture still find in the ordered exuberance of the _Faerie Queene_ an invigorating refreshment which no other book can supply. Doctor I.A. Richard's conception of a poem as a health-giving adjustement of impulses may not cover all poetry - I am not sure. But it certainly covers the _Faerie Queene_. Perhaps that is why, though it may fail to gain some readers, it seldom loses those it has once gained. I never meet a man who says that he _used to_ like the _Faerie Queene_.