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| Style | Luxuriant and spacious, yet simple and clear; seldom rivaled in the charm of its diffusion, the orient flush of its diction, and the music of its recurrent chimes. ... beautifully harmonious, combining a subtle perfection of phrase with a happy coalescence of meaning and melody ... Spenser's language, of one substance with the splendor of his fancy, would seem to have been chosen [rather] for its richness of tone than for its intensity of meaning |
| Rank | There had been much poetry, and not a little poetical power, since
Chaucer, but the Fairy Queen was the first production that might
challenge comparison with the Canterbury Tales ... All the past,
with its imagery, its illusion, its glory, -- and the present, with its
rough romantic beauties and gorgeous pageantry, -- descended upon the Fairy
of Spenser, and, in the mellow light of his imagination, lost the passion
of conflict, the grossness of lust, and the tarnish of physical contact.
His invention was extraordinary, and its mode unique. Shape after shape, scene after scene, monstrous and anomalous, or impossible and beautiful, rose from the unfathomable depths, to embody some shade of emotion or an idea; while, in the midst of the rising and commingling visions, he was unperturbed and serene, never hurrying, rarely if ever passionate. Next to Dante among the Italians, next to Virgil among the ancients, Milton surpasses him in the severity of his greatness, Shakespeare in the sweep and condensation of his power. Daring elevations, when they occur, indicate the strength of his genius rather than the habit of his mind. He lacked executive efficiency, -- the coordinating, centralizing quality of the highest order of imagination. But grandeur, intensity, and reflection aside, he is the most purely poetical of our writers. In the union of musical expression, fanciful conception of thought, and the exquisite sense of beauty, he exceeds them all. Eminent in wisdom, like every other greatest poet, he is also the finest dreamer that ever lived, and, as such, is the inheritance of all future generations |
| Character | Magnificently imaginative. Captivated with beauty; above all with beauty
of soul, which is the source of all outward charms ... Where most men see
only the perishable form and color of the thing, he saw the joy of it,
the soul of eternal youth that is in it. He is, of all our poets, the most
truly sensuous; but so chaste and ardent, that when he painted sentiment
and passion, or material loveliness, he could not but make the 'of glorious
feature'.
Such a one does not wait to get into the next stage of existence to begin to enter it. His sees that the Infinite Life is the world of essence; that it is the meaning which glows through all matter; that out of it flows all goodness, all truth, all enduring happiness on this side of the grave ... Sensitive , tender, grateful, devout, learned, wise, and introspective, with 'the vision and the faculty divine', his own words are applicable to him: The noble heart that harbors virtuous thought |
| Influence | He threw into English verse the soul of harmony, and made it more expansive, more richly descriptive, than it ever was before. More than any other, by his ideal method of treatment, and the splendor of his fancy, he contributed to the transformation of style and language ... he revealed, in lowly aspect, the ideal point of view; gave to souls a consciousness of their wings; sowed in them the seed of a noble discontent with prosaic views of life; fastened the attention upon necessary uncreated natures - Ideas, in whose divine atmosphere no man can be lifted, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine. This is the inestimable value of such a character, - that he forms a standing protest against the tyranny of commonplace ... The end of a moral being is, not food or raiment or estate, but soul-expansion; and the parent of all noblest improvement is love - the outflow of desire toward the true, beautiful, and good .. Whoever acts admirably upon the imagination, administers to this effect. Whoever gives the world a pictorial air, contributes to our emancipation. Whoever makes us more intensely and comprehensively imaginative, exalts us into the possession of incorruptible goods ... Centuries hence, men will be touched ... by this artist and his art. |
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