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Chpter 3 On Not Defending Poetry:Spenser, Suffering, and the Energy of Affect
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c h a p t e r 3 On Not Defending Poetry: Spenser, Suffering, and the Energy of Affect T he history of poetry is a history of apology. Early modern English writers, faced with a brave new world of anxieties about the value, validity, and cultural uses of poetry, produced myriad literary apologies . Philip Sidney and Thomas Lodge defended poetry, while Thomas Heywood, Philip Massinger, and George Whetstone defended drama. In his translation of Ludovico Ariosto, John Harington not only defended poetry but also appended to Orlando Furioso (1591) a moral allegory . Rhyme, imitation, and classical meter were attacked and heartily defended, as were religious poetry, difficult poetry, and tragicomedy. Sidney easily defends poetry against the claim that it is less true and less useful than sciences such as geometry and astronomy and professions such as law and medicine. But he sees a greater challenge to poetry (one requiring a stronger defense) in the claims for the superiority of philosophy and history, which he appropriates in his defense of poetry. Poetry provides a “perfect” or “speaking picture,” a clear rhetorical image that illustrates the moral lessons of philosophy and history. The simultaneous publication of Sidney’s work as A Defence of Poesy and An Apology for Poetry (1595) may have been an accident of history, but the slippage between apology and defense is no mere accident of usage. To defend poetry, for Sidney, is to define it as capable, by virtue of a moral force, of beating back a crowd of imposing rival claimants, each asserting a privileged access to truth and a greater capacity to represent reality . Out of this historic ethos emerges the real work of poetry: the creation of clear rhetorical images of moral truth. Sidney divorces poetry from the energies in language that such clear rhetorical images never capture. Such iconic, moral clarity appears ideal only when language is 108 The Legend of Temperance divorced from what makes it resonate so powerfully with bodily experience : its recalcitrant physicality, its vulnerability to time and change, and its capacity to excite and transmit affect. By not defending poetry, Edmund Spenser exposes the consequences of Sidney’s heroic rhetoric of defense. In a literary tradition full of apologies, confessions, and retractions, Spenser seems never to have written one. To be sure, a number of texts might appear to reflect the apologetic tone of the day: The Shepheardes Calendar (1579)—especially the October eclogue—with its ambiguous commentary by E. K.; the “Letter of the Authors”; and the proems to books 2, 3, and 4 of the Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). Yet these various metapoetic commentaries question the cultural status of the poet or discuss aspects of poetic representation; they neither defend nor excuse the practice of poetry. Spenser does respond to criticism of his own poetry at the opening of the Legend of Friendship, which begins the 1596 continuation of The Faerie Queene. But instead of describing or defining poetry, he defends and describes the nature of love, the misapprehension of which, he claims, has provoked his opponent’s unjust remarks. Why does Spenser deflect a defense of poetry into a defense of love? Eros was one way of disarming aggressive masculinity, as the proem to the first book of The Faerie Queene makes clear; the poet invokes Cupid and Venus to help him cool the rage of Mars. The heroic Sidney defends poetry at the price of restricting it to a narrow band of moral effects associated with the clarity of visual form. Spenser foregrounds what is most vital and moving about poetry by turning away from forceful visuality and locating an energy in intense experiences of physical and affective pain. This demilitarization of poetic practice releases a communicable energy rooted in the experience of human corporeality, an energy that resonates with the body and between bodies, giving poetry both its feeling of reality and its capacity to move. Poetry has been a problem at least since Plato precisely because its reality was as questionable as the morality of its depictions; its practice was subject to charges of irrationality, irrelevancy, and immorality. Criticism was born from the act of apology provoked by such responses. “As a consequence,” M. H. Abrams argued nearly half a century ago, “literary criticism had been maneuvered into a defensive stance from which it has never entirely recovered.” Margaret W. Ferguson, in her [3.137.174.216] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 15...
