Цитаты из книг — Джанет Спенс

The aim I have set before me in this book is to give back to English readers the understanding of and delight in this great poet which thrilled his contemporaries and early successors.

The Faerie Queene was intended by its author to be a philosophical poem and was so regarded by his contemporaries and immediate successors, whose appreciation of it was so great.

Spenser's age was eclectic, and poets in all ages take from the thought of the time what is akin to their own inner world. For the consistency of a poetic philosophy is not the logical consistency of the professional philosopher. It is a harmony of emotional experience, not a train of syllogistic reasoning. Now Spenser…

The philosophy of Plotinus with its tripartite division both of man and the universe at large into body, soul and spirit affords a key to much that has been held inconsistent, or at least disconnected, in Spenser's poetry.

To the Elizabethans, on the other hand, reality was a personal God fully reflected in miniature in man and faintly and partially in the different elements of the physical universe. As representative of the personal God, man was at once the explanation and the raison d'être of the physical universe.

Love is, in fact, Spenser's symbol for the unifying and dynamic forces in existence. As indicated above, when dealing with the physical universe, he accepts it as the creative aspect of that universe, and therefore good; but in the purely human relations, except when love is a symbol of the spiritual aspiration, the poet…

Spenser differs from the nineteenth century in the anthropomorphic nature of his imagery; but he differs in another respect from his contemporary Shakespeare, and the fact that our study of Elizabethan literature tends to start from the dramatist, has been perhaps a greater hindrance to our understanding of The Faerie…

Thus, on the one hand, Spenser's thought is steeped in sensuous detail, so that for him there is no really abstract thinking; men, he thinks, 'should be satisfied with the use of these days, seeing all things accounted by their showes, and nothing esteemed of, that is not delightfull and pleasing to commune sense' (…

The most interesting inconsistency in thought is connected with the Bower of Bliss. This passage--the twelfth canto of the second Book--is probably the best known in the whole poem and the most frequently cited as an example of Spenser's sensuous beauty. Professor de Selincourt writes: 'Those who blame Spenser for…

Now the twelfth canto of Book II is an almost literal translation from Tasso description in the Jerusalem Delivered of the island of Armida. That poem was not printed till 1582. It is likely enough that Spenser may have seen part of it in manuscript, which would account for the general resemblance of the Adonis passages,…

We have then, in the first part of The Faerie Queene, four of the seven deadly sins depicted in the more important passages of the four several books; those sins being much more elaborately and powerfully represented than the virtues, which are opposed to them, and which are personified in the titular heroes of the…

A vivid mental experience seemed to the Elizabethans like another personality affecting them from without. Personification was not a fully conscious mental activity, but an involuntary result of the combination of intense emotion with an inherited habit of mind.