Spenserian Moments

"There is more adventure in The Faerie Queene than in any other major English poem, and more various and delightful poetic effects. We descend into an alluring-alarming world of fairy tale, myth, and enchantment, the realm of pre-philosophical ideation, acoustically charged by those magical, knot-like Spenserian stanzas. In this wide-ranging book, which follows Spenser's exploratory method, Gordon Teskey illuminates the structure of the poem and explains the theory of allegory now, and in the poet's day. He examines the poem in the light of philosophy and art, and he accounts for the "sunset of idealism" in the poem's later, political books. In one chapter he discusses the allegorical paintings and sculptures at the French Colonial Exhibition of 1931, exposing the material motives behind Spenser's own engagements as a colonial administrator in Ireland. He concludes with The Faerie Queene's magnificent finale, "The Mutabilitie Cantos," a vision of life as dizzying, turbulent change"--