Imitating the Italians: Wyatt, Spenser, Synge, Pound, Joyce by Reed Way Dasenbrock (review)

Book Reviews71 earlier observation that it is indeed a satire of "astonishing vigor and virtuosity" (vii). An obvious omission in this study is a comparison of the Cromwell poems of Waller and Marvell. Chambers defends the omission adequately, but, considering the critical homogeneity ofrecent studies of Marvell's "Horatian Ode" and the neglect ofWaller's panegyrics, one is left wishing that Chambers had indeed devoted a chapter of his splendid "ransacking" to the Cromwell literature. BRUCE LAWSON University of Texas, El Paso REED WAY DASENBROCK. Imitating the Italians: Wyatt, Spenser, Synge, Pound, Joyce. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. 282 p. At a first encounter, Reed Way Dasenbrock's very interesting new book seems oddly organized, treating two sixteenth-century and three twentieth-century writers with little attention to the intervening periods. This arrangement, however, is essential to his purpose of exploring "the situated aspect of literature" conceived as "created by individual authors working at specific . . . moments in history" (11). One of Dasenbrock's stated goals is to bridge the "unfortunate rift" between recent theories of interpretation that "have repeatedly assured us that authorial intentions and the originating context of a work of art were unrecoverable" and literary scholarship, which, "in complete disregard for these theories," has "continued to recover contexts and make scholarly reconstructions of probable intentions" (12). Dasenbrock argues that the "false dichotomy" (20) between imitation and original work that is a legacy ofthe Romantic period would scarcely have been comprehensible to English poets ofthe sixteenth century. Wyatt and Spenser employed a "creative imitation" (22) of Petrarch and other Italian poets as a means of developing their own poetic voice and themes. Wyatt's "translations" of Petrarch's poems are "much more realistic and personal" (26) than the originals. He transforms Petrarch's "praise style" into a "blame style" (27) by omitting Petrarch's "compensatory abstract conclusions and all mention of the religious or the transcendent" (26). For example, in "Una candida cerva" (Canzoniere 190) Petrarch images Laura as a flawless white doe, wreathed with diamonds and topazes, "emblems respectively of steadfastness and chastity" (43). This flawless creature is unattainable because she belongs to God, and this thought comforts the poet. In Wyatt's version ofthe poem, "Whoso list to hunt," the doe (often thought to refer to Anne Boleyn) is still decked with diamonds, but the topazes are gone, and she is untouchable not because she belongs to God but because she belongs to the king. "In Wyatt's world, there are no comforting abstractions to which the poet can turn: there is only the social world of men and women, which proves highly unsatisfactory" (43). In Spenser's version of this poem (Amoretti 67), when the poet gives up the pursuit of the Lady, she abandons 72Rocky Mountain Review her flight and allows herself to be captured. Instead of the displaced love of Petrarch or the hopeless love of Wyatt, Spenser depicts "a more stable kind of love in which choices are permanent and involve a fixing or curbing of the self." Where other Elizabethan sonnet sequences, based on the Petrarchan model of the ardent lover and the stony Lady but lacking Petrarch's transcendence, have problems with endings, Spenser's Amoretti "can lead into his Epithalamion, his great poem celebrating his own marriage" (48). Dasenbrock argues that in TAe Faerie Queene Spenser imitates Petrarchan models in order to criticize the Petrarchism of Elizabeth's Italianate court, where the queen cast herself as the unattainable Laura and her courtiers as so many hopeless lovers. Spenser demonstrates particularly in Books 3 and 4 that "Petrarchan love—iftaken seriously—leads to a situation ofpathological dominance by the Lady," and "if tedien as a game to be played . . . can lead to a situation of dominance by the lover, a situation equally worthy of condemnation" (63). His solution is to replace "the Petrarchan ideal ofvirginity by a definition of chastity as married love in a way precisely parallel to (and undoubtedly influenced by) the general Protestant redefinition of marriage as the spiritually superior state" (74). By making this redefinition, Spenser marks the transition to the more suspicious attitude toward Italian influences that were to characterize the next three centuries of...