Edmund Spenser Quotes

“Men call you fayre, and you doe credit it,
For that your self ye daily such doe see:
But the trew fayre, that is the gentle wit,
And vertuous mind, is much more praysd of me.
For all the rest, how ever fayre it be,
Shall turne to nought and loose that glorious hew:
But onely that is permanent and free
From frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew.
That is true beautie: that doth argue you
To be divine and borne of heavenly seed:
Deriv'd from that fayre Spirit, from whom al true
And perfect beauty did at first proceed.
He onely fayre, and what he fayre hath made,
All other fayre lyke flowres untymely fade.”
― Edmund Spenser, Amoretti And Epithalamion

“Hark, how the cheerful birds do chaunt their lays, and carol of love's praise.”
― Edmund Spenser

“he gave an account of the Spenserian world that championed its ethical attitudes as well as their fairy-tale terms, with a rich joy in the defeat of dragons, giants, sorcerers, and sorceresses by the forces of virtue; it was a world he could inhabit and believe in as one inhabits and believes a dream of one's own; its knights, dwarfs, and ladies were real to him...he rejoiced as much in the ugliness of the giants and in the beauty of the ladies as in their spiritual significances, but most of all in the ambience of the faerie forest and plain that, he said, were carpeted with a grass greener than the common stuff of ordinary glades; this was the reality of grass, only to be apprehended in poetry: the world of the imagination was nearer to the truth than the world of the senses, notwithstanding its palpable fictions, and Spenser transcended sensuality by making use of it”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“I have dwelt at length with this poem because it epitomizes and transforms much eighteenth-century criticism of Spenser and because, like any other imitation, it acts as an implicit criticism of the original. The Minstrel takes up major themes in mid-century poetics and criticism - speculative interest in origins, natural descriptions, humble life, the supernatural, education, political corruption - and merges them, awkwardly it must be said - into something recalling a Spenserian romance. The celebrity of Beattie's poem has more to do with its intellectual than its poetic achievements. The Minstrel demonstated that romance could take on the serious social business hitherto treated in epic and georgic, epistle and satire; it proved to an age obsessed with originality that a poet might imitate wihout copying, and emulate Spenser in a way that avoided objections to archaism, allegory, and the use of stanzas in a long poem. Beattie did all these things but did them imperfectly. For the next fifty years, romantic Spenserians would retain beattie's doctrines while refining his poetics.”
― David Hill Radcliffe, Edmund Spenser: A Reception History