Volume 43, Number 20 · December 19, 1996
The Village Genius
By Anne Barton
John Clare: Poems of the Middle Period 1822-1837
edited by Eric Robinson, edited by David Powell, edited by P.M.S. Dawson
Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, Volume II, 402 pp., $105.00
There are certain poets—Spenser is one—with whom other poets, whatever the prejudices or inattention of the critics, have conspicuously kept faith. After his death in 1599 (when, according to Camden, contemporary writers symbolically threw not only verses but their pens into the grave), Spenser's general reputation slowly declined. It was with the practitioners that he continued to be important:Milton and Dryden, the young Keats, who was so transfixed by epithets like 'sea-shouldring Whales' in The Faerie Queene that he suddenly began to compose verse himself, and Yeats, for whom Spenser's lines were 'like bars of gold thrown ringing one upon another.'
Review, 5012 words
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