Chaucer, Spenser, Milton: Mythopoeic Continuities and Transformations by A. Kent Hieatt

Abstract

R E V I E W S A. Kent Hieatt, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton: Mythopoeic Continuities and Transformations (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen's University Press 1975). xviii, 292. $20.00 The study of sources and influences can be a strained, trivializing, and dull process, yet no lover of literature can ignore the shaping power of a great poet on his successors, nor fail to be fascinated by the ways in which the greatest of these successors transmute their inheritance into greatly individual and new poetry. Daniel's Musophilus is tentative in claiming a part in the process for his own lines, but is passionately convinced of the validity of the process itself: When as perhaps the words thou scornest now May live, the speaking picture of the mind, The extract of the soule that laboured how To leave the image of her selfe behind, Wherein posteritie that love to know The just proportion of our spirits may find. For these lines are the vaines, the Arteries, And undecaying life-strings of those harts That still shall pant, and still shall exercise The motion spirit and nature both imparts, And shall, with those alive so sympathize As nourisht with their powers injoy their parts. O blessed letters that combine in one All ages past, and make one live with all, By you we do confer with who are gone, And the dead living unto councell call... Any individual who has attempted to define his own essence by exploring the intricate web of heredity and environment that has shaped him knows how complicated an analytical process this is, yet knows too that the effort can illuminate both the thing affecting and the thing affected. So the critic who seeks to explore the life-strings of poetic heredity must perceive the just E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , rv, 4 , Winter 19 7 8 469 proportion of affecting and affected to discern the nature of the sympathy between those of great powers and parts. It is a delicate task, demanding the sensitivity even of the spider's touch, that "Feels at each thread, and lives along the line." Professor Hieatt's study of the poetic genealogical lines from Chaucer to Spenser to Milton examines each work he has chosen to consider with exquisite care, and with delicate and imaginative sympathy feels out the threads woven through all three poets' work into their own individual patterns. Professor Hieatt has imposed a certain simplicity of outline on this complex task by choosing two sets of moral ideas that he finds still vital, familiar, and current, and by examining the related poetic structures used by Chaucer and Spenser in presenting the first, and by Spenser and Milton in presenting the second. The first of these concerns the idea that personal integrity and freedom of choice are essential in human relationships (particularly sexual ones); the second, that it is wrong to be intemperate either through "the passionate propensity to seize credit and get ahead of others violently and fraudulently," or through "the self-indulgent propensity to throw in one's hand and retreat into any available sensual bliss" (p 2). His discussion is further ordered by his use of two "specialized terms": " moralized landscape," used of scenes whose details are charged with symbolic meaning and which "body forth a numinous world," and "chivalric adven­ ture,” which Hieatt suggests describes "narratives of the world of partly symbolic action." These terms are put forward as generally necessary for the discussion of "continuities and transformations," but it transpires that they are considerably more useful in considering Chaucer and Spenser than Milton. Another unifying force in Professor Hieatt's study is his conviction that the moral notions whose poetic presentation he is examining are important, and that it should be central to our priorities as human beings to grasp the insights offered by these, the greatest of English poets. The energy of his belief in the poetry's relevance consistently unifies his minute examination of detail, and his learned explorations. The book needs this firmness of outline and sustaining unity of tone, because its subject matter is broad...