Edmund Spenser
36 quotes
Biography
"For love is a celestial harmonyOf likely hearts compos'd of stars' concent,Which join together in sweet sympathy,To work each other's joy and true content,Which they have harbour'd since their first descentOut of their heavenly bowers, where they did seeAnd know each other here belov'd to be."
"Why then should witless man so much misweeneThat nothing is but that which he hath seene?"
"Death slue not him, but he made death his ladder to the skies."
"So love is Lord of all the world by right."
"Uncouthe, unkiste, sayde the olde famous poete Chaucer."
"So now they have made our English tongue, a gallimaufray or hodgepodge of al other speches."
"Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song."
"Fierce warres and faithfull loves shall moralize my song."
"A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine."
"The noblest mind the best contentment has."
"Entire affection hateth nicer hands."
"And all for love, and nothing for reward."
"Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound."
"Ill can he rule the great, that cannot reach the small."
"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."
"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."
"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 must acknowledge that Virgil in Latin, and Spenser in English, have been my masters."
"No man was ever born with a greater genius, or had more knowledge to support it."
"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."
"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."
"I think that if he had not been a great poet, he would have been a great painter."
"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."
"Our sage and serious poet Spencer, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas."
"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."