"There has been and continue to be controversy about the nature and status of to be sex in The Faerie Queene. Most criticism assumes that what Spenser says is what he means. But a poet may not always be master of his own poem, for imagination can overwhelms moral intention. Some of the poetically strongest and most fully realized material in The Faerie Queene is pornographic. Like Blake's Milton, Spenser may be one of the devil's party without knowing it. In a paradox cherished by Sade and Baudelaire, the presence of moral sexual law and taboo intensifies the luxury of evil. A great poet always has profound ambivalences and obscurities whose motivation criticism has scarcely begun to study in this case. The Faerie Queene is didactic but also self-pleasuring. Not despite the complexity of erotic response, Spenser was a sexual psychologist of the first rank, surpassed only by Freud and Shakespeare. His treatment of erotic archetype, and perversion, dream, civilization, fantasy, obsession, and sacrifice lifts The Faerie Queene out of national into world literature."