Edmund Spenser, Lucretian Neoplatonist: Cosmology in the Fowre Hymnes

Abstract

J N THE DEDICATION to the Fowre Hymnes, Spenser offers one of the few explicit «autobiographical narratives to be found among his printed poems:Having in the greener times of my youth composed these former two Hymnes in the praise of Love and Beautie, and finding that the same too much pleased those of like age and disposition, which being too vehemently caried with that kind of affection, do rather sucke out poyson to their strong passion, then hony to their honest delight, I was moved by the one of you two most excellent Ladies, to call in the same.1This story, with its tale of attempted retraction, has presented Spenser scholars with a puzzle: are the Hymnes a hybrid work comprised of two youthful Petrarchan poems and two later religious corrections to the poet's giovenile errore? Why did Spenser feel moved to publish a hymnic palinode in 1596, the same year he published the six-book Faerie Que ene? Perhaps more importantly, does the mystery of chronology and autobiography help illuminate the subject of the Hymnes themselves? The propositions of Robert Ellrodt, in his 1960 study, have done little to settle these questions of motive and content. Despite claiming that the poems could not have been composed before 1595 through a discussion of the Neoplatonism of Spenser's poetry, Ellrodt only threw into sharper relief Spenser's story of retraction and the possibility that it may be a fiction.2 Why did the poet insist on this fiction? And what ex«actly was Spenser recanting in his own work?'Long considered the apotheosis of sixteenth-century English Neoplatonism, particularly in the form of Petrarchan poetry, the Hymnes are perhaps the least studied poems of the Spenserian corpus. While there is critic«al consensus about their importance, we have yet to grasp firmly their relationship to the poet's other works or to the sociopolitical matrix into which Spenser has so successfully been reinserted in the last twenty years of scholarship. In fact, the determined absence of topical detail in the Hymnes, as well as their sheen of formal symmetry, have made them somewhat impenetrable to critical approaches based on historicist methods and political interests; the handful of essays on the poems treat either their philosophical sources or their formal structure.4 Thus, we might note that the Hymnes have seemed paradoxically both too easy and too difficult to Yet Spenser's palinodie frame for the Fowre Hymnes in the dedication's story of origin provides us with a powerful key to understanding the poems. Indeed, it is worth noting that not only the dedication, but also An Hymne of Heavenly Love, contain palinodie gestures, as though Spenser meant to thematize the movement of action and retraction, turn and counterturn within the work as a whole. The palinode or recantation was of course a much-used lyric trope in the Renaissance.3 Its classical source is Stesichorus's ode recantation of the Helen, famously imitated and discussed by Socrates in the Phaedrus (243a), while its best known Renaissance imitator might be Petrarch, whose Rime sparse is framed as a palinode, an Augustinian recantation of juvenile erotic experience.6 This turn away from either erotic nugae or errori to grand devotional themes, whether in Socrates' repudiation of erotic furor or in Petrarch's turn towards the Vergine bella, was simultaneously a sign of humility and ambition, a double-edged gesture that suggested genuine conversion as well as ironic self-consciousness. …