Epic Poets

"To kerke the narre from God more farre, Has bene an old-sayd sawe; And he that strives to touche a starre Oft stombles at a strawe."

"Is not thilke the mery moneth of May, When love lads masken in fresh aray?"

"Bring hether the Pincke and purple Cullambine, With Gelliflowres: Bring Coronations, and Sops in wine, Worne of Paramoures. Strowe me the ground with Daffadowndillies, And Cowslips, and Kingcups, and loved Lillies: The pretie Pawnce, And the Chevisaunce, Shall match with the fayre flowre Delice."

"And whither rennes this bevie of ladies bright, Raunged in a rowe?"

"To be wise and eke to love, Is graunted scarce to God above."

"So now they have made our English tongue, a gallimaufray or hodgepodge of al other speches."

"Uncouthe, unkiste, sayde the olde famous poete Chaucer."

"I was promised on a time To have reason for my rhyme; From that time unto this season, I received nor rhyme nor reason."

"So love is Lord of all the world by right."

"Death slue not him, but he made death his ladder to the skies."

"I hate the day, because it lendeth light To see all things, but not my love to see."

"Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace, I called him Brother, Englishman, and Friend!"

"No poet borrows so much from learned languages as Spencer."

"Sweet Spenser, sweetest bard; yet not more sweet Than pure was he, and not more pure than wise, High priest of all the Muses' mysteries."

"The great master of English versification, incomparably the greatest master in our language."

"Spenser, I think, may be reckoned the first of our heroic poets. He had a large spirit, a sharp judgment, and a genius for heroic poetry, perhaps above any that ever wrote since Virgil. But our misfortune is, he wanted a true idea, and lost himself by following an unfaithful guide. Though besides Homer and Virgil he had read Tasso, yet he rather suffered himself to be misled by Ariosto, with whom blindly rambling on marvels and adventures, he makes no conscience of probability; all is fanciful and chimerical, without any uniformity, or without any foundation in truth; his poem is perfect fairy land."

"It is easy to mark out the general course of our poetry. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Dryden, are the great landmarks for it."

"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."

"The Fairie Queene makes cinema out of the west's primary principle: to see is to know; to know is to control. The Spenserian eye cuts, wounds, rapes."

"Spenser was among his [Thomas Gray] favourite poets; and he told me he never sat down to compose poetry without reading Spenser for a considerable time previously."

"Our sage and serious poet Spencer, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas."

"Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet."

"What he feels on one level, he feels on all. When the good and fair appear to him, the whole man responds; the satyrs gambol, the lances splinter, the shining ones rise up. There is a place for everything and everything is in its place. Nothing is repressed; nothing is insubordinate. To read him is to grow in mental health."

"I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it."

"Thee gentle Spenser fondly led, But me he mostly sent to bed."

"The poets' poet."

"I think that if he had not been a great poet, he would have been a great painter."

"This poet contains great beauties, a sweet and harmonious versification, easy elocution, a fine imagination: Yet ... it soon becomes a kind of task-reading; and it requires some effort and resolution to carry us on to the end of his long performance. ...the affectations, and conceits, and fopperies of chivalry...appear ridiculous... The tediousness of continued allegory, and that too seldom striking or ingenious, has also contributed to render the Fairy Queen peculiarly tiresome; not to mention the too great frequency of its descriptions, and the languor of its stanza. Upon the whole, Spencer maintains his place in the shelves among our English classics: But he is seldom seen on the table."

"His versification is at once the most smooth and the most sounding in the language. It is a labyrinth of sweet sounds...that would cloy by their very sweetness, but that the ear is constantly relieved and enchanted by their continued variety of modulation. ... It is the perfection of melting harmony, dissolving the soul in pleasure or holding it captive in the chains of suspense."

"No man was ever born with a greater genius, or had more knowledge to support it."

"I must acknowledge that Virgil in Latin, and Spenser in English, have been my masters."

"For us Anishinaabe, Biskaabiiyang is a specific term that means “returning to the woods,” because we’re woodland peoples. For example, I grew up growing my “three sisters”—that is, corn, beans, and squash—along the edge of the forest, using what people now call sylvan culture or permaculture. It’s curious how this counters the perspective of classical authors like Dante in early modern Europe or, later, Edmund Spenser, an important Renaissance poet, who view the woods as this terrifying presence. Why is this decolonizing? Because through boarding schools and many other colonial experiences, that fear of the woods creeps in."

"[T]hat matchlesse Poem, The Faery Queen, written by our English Virgil."

"The biography of Spenser is to a great extent a series of assumptions, or of assertions, repeated by one writer after another, but resting originally upon little or no evidence."

"I remember when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of devotion), but there was wont to lie Spenser's works; this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights, and giants, and monsters, and brave houses, which I found everywhere there (though my understanding had little to do with all this); and by degrees with the tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers, so that I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a poet."

"He threw the soul of harmony into our verse, and made it more warmly, tenderly, and magnificently descriptive than it ever was before, or, with a few exceptions, than it has ever been since. ... We shall nowhere find more airy and expansive images of visionary things, a sweeter tone of sentiment, or a finer flush in the colours of language, than in this Rubens of English poetry. ... Though his story grows desultory, the sweetness and grace of his manner still abide by him. He is like a speaker whose tones continue to be pleasing, though he may speak too long."

"Ere he ended his melodious song, An host of angels flew the clouds among, And rapt this swan from his attentive mates To make him one of their associates In heaven's fair choir."

"I trow that countenance cannot lie, Whose thoughts are legible in the eie."

"For we by conquest, of our soveraine might, And by eternall doome of Fate's decree, Have wonne the Empire of the Heavens bright."

"And in his hand a sickle he did holde, To reape the ripened fruits the which the earth had yold."

"The gentle minde by gentle deeds is knowne. For a man by nothing is so well bewrayd, As by his manners."

"A monster, which the Blatant beast men call, A dreadfull feend of gods and men ydrad."

"But Justice, though her dome [doom] she doe prolong, Yet at the last she will her owne cause right."

"Ill can he rule the great, that cannot reach the small."

"Who will not mercie unto others show, How can he mercy ever hope to have?"

"Me seemes the world is runne quite out of square, From the first point of his appointed sourse, And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse."

"As withered weed through cruell winters tine, That feeles the warmth of sunny beames reflection, Liftes up his head, that did before decline And gins to spread his leafe before the faire sunshine."

"For all that Nature by her mother-wit Could frame in earth."

"Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled, On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled."

"And as she lookt about, she did behold, How over that same dore was likewise writ, Be bold, be bold, and every where Be bold, That much she muz'd, yet could not construe it By any ridling skill, or commune wit. At last she spyde at that same roomes upper end, Another yron dore, on which was writ, Be not too bold."