"The Faerie Queene is the most extended and extensive meditation on sex in the history of poetry. It charts the entire erotic spectrum, a great chain of being rising from matter to spirit, from the coarsest lust to chastity and romantic idealism. The poem’s themes of sex and politics are parallel: the psyche, like society, must be disciplined by good government. Spenser agrees with the classical and Christian philosophers on the primacy of reason over animal appetites. He looks forward to the Romantic poets, however, in the way that he shows the sex impulse as ultimately daemonic and barbaric, breeding witches and sorcerers of evil allure. Like the Odyssey, The Faerie Queene is a heroic epic in which the masculine must evade female traps or delays."

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Poets from EnglandCritics of religionAnglicans from the United KingdomEpic poetsPeople from London
Original Language: English
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Sources

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990), p. 188

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Spenser

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Poets from EnglandCritics of religionAnglicans from the United KingdomEpic poetsPeople from London

Edmund Spenser

Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 – 13 January 1599) was an English poet, who wrote such pastorals as The Shepheardes Calendar, Astrophell and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, but is most famous for the multi-layered allegorical romance, The Faerie Queene.

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