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Neoteric Poetics in the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser

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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 12-2015 "O Carefull Verse": Neoteric Poetics in the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser Melissa Joy Rack University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Rack, Melissa Joy, ""O Carefull Verse": Neoteric Poetics in the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2015. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/3554 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Melissa Joy Rack entitled ""O Carefull Verse": Neoteric Poetics in the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Robert E. Stillman, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Heather Hirschfeld, Anthony Welch, Robert Sklenar Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) “O Carefull Verse”: Neoteric Poetics in the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Melissa Joy Rack December 2015 © Copyright 2015 by Melissa Joy Rack All rights reserved. ii For Papa – Carpent tua poma nepotes iii Acknowledgments I owe a tremendous debt to the scholars who have tirelessly labored to make this project possible. They have read and marked countless drafts, provided invaluable suggestions, rescued me from research wormholes, and helped me find answers to so many questions. Foremost of these is Rob Stillman, whose brilliance, creativity, solidarity, and shrewd analysis have been a priceless gift to me these many years. Thank you for your patience, your insistent emphasis on close reading, and your unwavering faith in my abilities. Heather Hirschfeld, your support and many lessons in writing and analysis were essential to my training as a scholar. Anthony Welch, I am grateful for your remarkable insight, kind encouragement and tremendous compassion. Robert Sklenar, in spite of your protestations that you are a “hands-off” outside reader, without your expertise in Latin poetry, this project, as it stands, would never have been possible. Thank you for masterfully helping me solve seemingly impossible inter-textual conundrums, answering innumerable questions about translation and literary influence, and for sharing my great passion for Catullus. I am lucky to have such a diverse and supportive community of teachers, colleagues, and friends. Nicole Guenther Discenza and Sylvia Ruffo Fiore, my undergraduate professors, thank you for fostering my fledgling love of literature. Roland Greene, you introduced me to the term “neoteric,” and then urged me to make it my own. For that I will always be grateful. Rachel Hile, you proved to me it was possible to be both a single mother and a scholar, and took the time to mentor me during a difficult period. Be assured I will “pay it forward.” David Wilson-Okamura, thank you for your “style” and all your support. David Hadbawnik, Anne Prescott, Ted Steinberg, Michael Stapleton, Sean Henry, Roy Liuzza, Michael Keene, Art Smith, Laura Howes, Martin Griffin, Scott Bevill, Tori Swanson, Jody Martin, Salena Burch, Shaun Morgan, Elizabeth Ruleman, I have learned more from each of you than you will ever know. I am truly blessed by the continual love and support of my parents and sister. Thank you for believing in me, always being there to listen, and for your many lessons. Yet if there is an even greater blessing, my dear Jade, my sweet Caleb, and my baby Danae, it is being your mother. We have traveled so far on this journey together; yet for you it is only the beginning. Thank you for making life beautiful and for making me strong. You are my heart. You have my heart. iv Abstract This study aims to illuminate a new aesthetic in the shorter poems of Edmund Spenser. I introduce the concept of Elizabethan neoteric poetry as a method of describing the set of poetic values that inform these poems. Spenser’s shorter poems are puzzling to critics because of their peculiar style, and because they deviate from the traditional rota Virgilii, or laureate career trajectory in which the poet progresses from pastoral eclogue, to didactic georgic, and finally to epic. This model is complicated considerably by the peculiar pastoral innovation of the Shepheardes Calender (1579), as well as Spenser’s return, late in his career, to the composition of highly experimental shorter verse in the Complaints (1591), The Daphnaida (1591), and The Mutabilitie Cantos (1609). Although the influence of Virgil and Ovid has been previously established in these poems, this study claims it is a more useful exercise to read them alongside the work of the Latin poet Catullus. Catullus’s literary circle looked to the work of the ancient Alexandrian scholar-poets for their literary models, particularly Callimachus, Theocritus, and Euphorian. As such, their “epyllia” or “minor epics” interpret shorter selections from Homeric epic with an eye to erudition, craftsmanship, elegance of phrase, brevity of form, and stylistic polish. These “neoterics” or “new poets” were the avante-garde literati of their age; thus, it is curious that Spenser announces himself as the “new Poete” at the outset of the Shepheardes Calender, and then proceeds to declare a generically experimental poetic programme that relies on radical opposition, difference, and fragmentation. Neoteric poetry takes the form of an epyllion and is written in a “plaintive” voice. Its subject is art and the artistic process, and it exhibits an ornate and ostentatious style that highlights the artificiality or “thingliness” of the materials of poetry. This calling attention to the dissonance in the space between sign and referent is at the heart of Spenser’s defiant creation of an entirely new genre or literary “kind.” v Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction......……………………………………………..…………………..1 Catullus in the Sixteenth Century………………………………………………………...7 Neoteric Form………………………………………………………………………….11 Neoteric Style…………………………………………………………………………..20 Neotericism in Theory and Practice…………………………………………………….24 Chapter 2: A Neoteric Manifesto: The Shepheardes Calender…………………………………29 Peculiar Pastoral…..………...……………………………………………………..........36 Aesthetic Secrecy……………………………………………………………………….42 Humility (but not really)………………………………………………………………...46 Poetic Adolescence……………………………………………………………………..52 Neoteric Revision………………………………………………………………………56 Neoteric Artistry………………………………………………………………………..65 Conclusion: “O Carefull Verse”………………………………………………………...75 Chapter 3: “Denique Testis”: Murder and Mourning in Muiopotmos………………………..79 Reading Muiopotmos in Context: The Complaints………………………………………….83 Reading Muiopotmos: The Critics………………………………………………………...86 Framing Muiopotmos……………………………………………………………………..89 Dressing the “Flie”……………………………………………………………………..94 A Theatre for Worldlings: Murderous Birth………………………………………………..98 The Poet-Creator and Guide…………………………………………………………..103 The Murder of Art…………………………………………………………………….109 Chapter 4: Death by Rhetoric: Seeking Silence in the Daphnaida………………………….122 Historical Readings……………………………………………………………………125 Tradition and Revision………………………………………………………………...132 Self-Stylization: Alcyon and E.K………………………………………………………137 Plundering the Pastoral………………………………………………………………..143 Alcyon’s Excessive “Noise”…………………………………………………………...147 Tears of Absence……………………………………………………………………...149 A Desire for Silence…………………………………………………………………...156 Chapter 5: “Thy Decay Thou Seekst by thy Desire”: The Mutabilitie Cantos……………….160 The Fragment and the Critics…………………………………………………………166 The “Things” of Mutability……………………………………….…………………...171 The Neoteric Poet: Mistress of Change………………………………………………..173 Revision from Ruin…………………………………………………………………....182 The Shepheardes Calender in Faerie Land………………………………………………....188 Imagining Mutability…………………………………………………………………..191 Chapter 6: Conclusion…………………………………………………………….............194 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..199 Vita……………………………………………………………………………………....222 vi Chapter 1: Introduction The imposition of the Virgilian rota on the canon of Edmund Spenser has long been problematic. The assumption of this paradigm is that Spenser, as the new “English Virgil,” is an epic poet who must move through the composition of pastoral eclogue and didactic georgic, before finally achieving his magnum opus. D.M. Rosenberg usefully summarizes this point of view: “[The] Virgilian paradigm provided a generic scale for the poet to ascend, challenging him to imitate a literary kind at each step.”1 Yet a number of problems arise in the application of this model to the Spenserian career trajectory; for Spenser deviates from it considerably. He begins, accordingly, with The Shepheardes Calender, a pastoral eclogue-georgic hybrid, fast-forwarding
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