Spenser's poetics of corporeality and its influence on Milton

This thesis is concerned with the relationship between rhetoric, reading and fallen bodies—both natural and imagined—within Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and the influence of Spenser’s practice on his greatest ‘poetical son’, John Milton. It begins and ends with allegory, from the ‘continued allegory, or darke conceit’ through which Spenser examines the fallen world to Milton’s account of the genesis of allegory through the experience of the Fall.
A longstanding critical tradition tends to perpetuate the assumption that allegory is a form with an inherently authoritarian bias, dictating the renunciation of the literal, or bodily. This thesis demonstrates how Spenser’s view of the fallen corporeal self, in which the material is as wholly valent as the spiritual, necessitates his adoption of a mode of allegory that does not always privilege, or clearly offer, an abstraction over an image. Affirming with Augustine that both allegorical thinking and the related condition of mortality and embodiment inexorably define fallen life, Spenser delivers a ‘body poetic’ that finds value in such experience, rather than struggling to elude it. His poetry, I argue, meditates upon how a state of congenital corruption might be turned to restorative effect. The amorous quest, which requires the development of an interpretive temper founded in love, rather than reason alone, becomes Spenser’s troubled response.
Milton, it might be objected, was no allegorist and his hermeneutical anti-allegorism—with particular regard to interpreting Scripture—has been recently traced in detail. While acknowledging both these formal differences and related conceptual differences in Milton’s attitude to the body, to sex and to reason, this thesis seeks to explain why he nevertheless chose Spenser as a poetical pedagogue above his other predecessors. I argue that the mode of engaging directly with our embodiment, and our situation in the corporeal world that Spenserian allegory demands, is crucial to Milton’s continuing project that seeks to ‘repair the ruines of our first parents’. Spenserian influence is apparent everywhere in his canon from the construction and critique of ideal forms of virtue in A Maske, to wedded love and labour in Eden, and perhaps most crucially, in his adoption of a poetics that figures mutability and materiality as both a challenge to human perfectibility, and the central expression of Providence in the world.
In contrast to those who broadly oppose the two poets’ manner of teaching, to those who claim that Milton’s relationship to Spenser might be summarised in his decision not to write an allegorical epic and to those who claim that Milton was a covert allegorist, I argue for an important affinity between the way in which Spenser represents (through narrative), and Milton describes, the relation of the physical to the metaphysical. My thesis shows how a technique of figuration in Spenser, a peculiarly literal form of allegory, might be seen to become a systematic cosmology for Milton: literary materiality into a monist materialism that excludes the dualism of matter and spirit. Through sustained close readings, I demonstrate how the allegorical procedures of The Faerie Queene are adapted and enlarged in Paradise Lost as accommodated vision. To summarize, this thesis illuminates a new facet of a powerful, but highly elusive relationship in English literary history.

Advisor: McCabe, R