Gerusalemme liberata<\/em>. Gabriel Harvey, after all, referred to Spenser as \u2018my young Italianate Signor and French Monsieur.\u2019 Spenser\u2019s style may be highly personal, but it is also, crucially, a \u2018period style,\u2019 with connections to the works of other writers who were struggling with the same task of reconstructing epic in the vernacular.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\nWilson-Okamura also points to the influence of the Aeneid<\/em>: \u201cNoting that late Roman, medieval and early modern critics often viewed the Aeneid <\/em>as a compendium of Homeric styles \u2013 the first six books broadly comic in formal terms, like the Odyssey; the following six tragic, like the Iliad \u2013 he argues that Spenser aimed to follow a similar pattern.\u201d<\/p>\nThis suggests to Wilson-Okamura where Spenser might have gone if he had lived to complete his poem: \u201cWere Spenser to complete more books,\u201d he writes, \u201cthere would, of course, be new episodes, but also, we suspect, a new style; and that style would be modeled on tragedy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Edmund Spenser\u2019s style in the Fairie Queene was odd even when he first wrote it, and Spenser scholars have long argued the whys and wherefores. David Scott Wilson-Okamura argues that, unique as it was, Spenser\u2019s style has sources both in contemporary poetry and antiquity. According to the TLS reviewer of\u00a0Spenser\u2019s International Style, \u201cFor Wilson-Okamura, many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[641,642],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-edmund-spenser","category-fairie-queene"],"yoast_head":"\n
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