Spenserian MomentsGordonTeskey Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2019. 552 pp. ISBN 13: 9780674988446. $47.00 (cloth).

Abstract

Do we need to choose between Edmund Spenser and John Milton—pick a team, as it were? The example set by Gordon Teskey across more than three decades of his unique and expansive scholarship makes this question harder to answer than it might appear. It has been clear since his 1986 article “From Allegory to Dialectic: Imagining Error in Spenser and Milton” that these two poets are intertwined and inseparable in Teskey's thinking. Spenser and Milton have, however, formed a necessary pair for him by virtue not of their likeness but of their contrast—as the two figures who push opposed habits and strategies of imagination to distinct but mutually illuminating extremes. Thus, at the outset of Delirious Milton (2006), Teskey contrasted Spenser as “an archaeological thinker, that is, one who thinks through the temporal layers of the accumulated remains of the past” with Milton as “a thinker of the archē, of the governing principle,” and he compared “Spenser, the poet of hallucination” with “Milton, the poet of delirium, the artist [who] no longer stands apart but undergoes the experience himself” (6, 15). These statements suggest that Teskey pairs these poets in the way that an artist like Chaim Soutine might deploy strikingly contrasting colors in portraits such as La Jeune Anglaise or Enfant de Choeur—for the sake of revelation by startling disparity. The contrast between Spenser and Milton is no less foundational to Teskey's magisterial latest book, Spenserian Moments, which contains most of his writings on Spenser to date, some of them substantially revised for this volume, as well as several entirely new chapters. The volume confirms Teskey as the most intellectually bold, expansive, and creative critic of Spenser currently writing. The third section of Spenserian Moments, titled “On Thinking,” contains three essays—“From Moment to Moment,” “Thinking Moments in The Faerie Queene,” and “Courtesy and Thinking”—which are its critical core, and it is no accident that the last of these essays makes the comparison with Milton that flickers intermittently throughout the book central to its argument. “Spenser,” Teskey writes, stands in contrast to Milton. When we read through the arc of Milton's epic achievement from Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, we feel that everything pertaining to the thought, the dianoia of these poems, has been worked out in advance … Milton's poems are brilliantly didactic achievements. They do not think: they teach what has already been thought. . . . … If Milton could see farther than Spenser into any given issue—and the “givenness” of the issue is important—Spenser can take us into areas of thought of which Milton could not have suspected the existence. Milton is the poet of the Will as a rational project, grasping the truth and setting it forth with unmistakable clarity and irresistible force. Spenser is the poet of Gelassenheit, of composure and calm, but also of “releasement” or “letting go,” whereby the very relaxation of effort and of mental tension gives to his project an experimental character, allowing unexpected structures in thinking to emerge. (317–18) I have quoted this paragraph at some length both because it exemplifies Teskey's virtuosic way with comparison and with generalization, and because it confirms the extent to which the contrast between Spenser and Milton is foundational to the account of the former that Teskey develops throughout Spenserian Moments. The volume begins with disarming simplicity, with Teskey explaining: “This is a book about poetry as improvisation, in particular, improvised thinking” (1). If Spenser appears in Teskey's earlier work on Milton as a poet of archaeology and of hallucination, he comes to the fore here as the poet of improvisation, and this lies at the heart of his talent for “allowing unexpected structures in thinking to emerge.” It is important to recognize the quiet artfulness and subtlety of this claim: structures in thinking are not the same as structures of thinking, which is how our minds might first leap to read it. Spenser's poetry may, in its improvisatory unfolding, reveal certain structures that are internal to thought in the process of their coming into being, but in thinking also means in the act of thinking. The deliberate ambiguity of phrasing emphasizes Teskey's central point, which is that in Spenser's work structure and emergence are perennially intervolved, rather than the first proceeding from the second. For Teskey Spenser is paradigmatically the poet of emergent phenomena in this sense: he writes elsewhere in the book that “Spenser is concerned with the coming-into-appearance of the historical as such and of the consciousness of living in history,” a claim immediately followed by another contrast with Milton, as well as with Shakespeare, both of whom “are so fundamentally astounded by this phenomenon, by this coming-into-appearance of the historical past, that they gaze on it as on the face of Medusa” (330). Before I say anything more about these specific arguments, I want first to observe the remarkable overturning of traditional views of Spenser that they undertake, and the extent to which the content of the claims is inseparable from Teskey's critical style or habitus. When teaching Spenser's poetry, one is constantly reminded that it is difficult for students to avoid experiencing it upon first reading as all rigid structure and all dusty convention. It can seem to have none of the imaginative “give” that improvisation requires, and to be comprised of a tissue of received wisdom that is regurgitated in the manner of the vomiting Errour, rather than as a poetry being discovered anew in the experimental sense upon which Teskey insists. Helping students to see past this veil of conventional appearances—much more intransigent and forbidding than the veil of allegory, with which they tend to have less difficulty—is the first step in the poem coming alive for them: this means finding ways of being surprised by the poetry, caught off guard in our default interpretive habits, made (often laughingly) to rethink them. Spenserian Moments conveys less a method of reading than a way of being in the company of Spenser's poetry that learns from and replicates some of its features as Teskey describes them. More than any other critic I know, Teskey is capable of genuine effects of surprise: it is impossible to know what the next page will bring. He has recourse at times to contemporary historic and poetic comparisons—the situating of Spenser in relation to Italian writings on poetics is particularly illuminating—but is equally willing to turn to Hegel or Heidegger when the thoughts that he wishes to think call for it. He also has a rich repertoire of analogies from modern contexts, especially the physical sciences, as when he writes that “Personifications in Spenser … oscillate, sometimes violently, between daemonic being and poetic conception, rather like an agitated “`Brownian motion’ (the random agitations of microscopic particles in a fluid or gas, bombarded by much smaller molecules)” (189). There is a refreshing and exemplary sense in reading Spenserian Moments of the kind of thinking that Spenser demands not having been determined in advance: the resources of literary theory, of historical specificity, of comparative poetics, of contemporary analogy are all to be drawn upon, but with a form of sophisticated deliberation that produces a constant experience of improvisatory novelty for the reader that is clearly inspired by the poetry it describes. I have focused on Teskey's general approach in this book because the rich specifics of his argument cannot be rehearsed here, and because his frequent contrast between Spenser and Milton is likely to be of particular interest to readers of Milton Quarterly. I will end by making two points that pertain in different ways to this foundational contrast between the two poets. At first glance, Spenserian Moments seems to be a counterpart volume to Teskey's The Poetry of John Milton, which similarly began with a beguilingly simple, even traditional approach to its subject—presenting itself as “an exercise in the art of literary criticism, which I take to be the appreciation of quality, of excellence, in art made with words”—and went on to exercise this art with a comparably astonishing intellectual range (xi). In Spenserian Moments Teskey characterizes Spenser as the poet of the moment precisely by contrasting him with Milton as the poet of the episode (267), but this volume is quite unlike The Poetry of John Milton in being itself a book of moments, quite different from the sustained and largely chronological exegesis of Milton in that earlier book. This can be read as another way in which method reflects subject matter, but it is also a sign of the academic times, since a significant number of the chapters were originally written as essays for the endlessly proliferating handbooks and companions that seem at times to be taking over the world like Errour's teeming brood. While the threads of connection between the chapters are artfully woven, they still read as serving quite different purposes, or readerships. The kinds of overview offered in the chapters that make up Part 1 seem aimed at a very different reader from the core chapters on the quality of the Spenserian moment, and I was curiously aware in reading through the book from cover to cover that this linear approach was actually less than fully suitable—just as recent scholarship has shown that historical readers of The Faerie Queene have rarely read it from start to close either (see Catherine Nicholson, Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene [Princeton: Princeton UP, 2020]). I would advise readers whose primary interest is in Milton by all means to read the whole book, but to start with Part 3, which, as I have suggested, provides the conceptually rich, stimulating and Miltonically inflected basis from which to approach the rest. Let me close with a final point. My own thinking about Spenser and Milton has been deeply informed by Teskey's contrasts between them, and above all by the description of them as respectively the poet of improvisatory thinking and the poet of thought, thoughts that I cite above. When I first encountered this claim, in the version published as an article in 2003, I had two immediate responses. The first was: that's inspired—an extraordinarily rich and succinct way of capturing something deeply true about both poets! The second was: I don't agree! My response to this claim is now more developed, but remains at root largely the same. I should acknowledge that, when it comes to the nature of the poetic moment, Teskey mitigates the contrast between the pair, distancing himself from the claim “that Paradise Lost has no moments” (267; as an aside here, I would note that it is a shame that Teskey does not engage with J. Martin Evans's wonderful and underrated book The Miltonic Moment, whose account of the wavering instant in Milton's early verse might have resonated productively with his argument). I would argue that Paradise Lost does indeed contain moments in the sense that Teskey describes, but also that these contain, or convey an effect of, spontaneous, improvisatory thinking. Though Teskey does not make the point in this way, to accept the pre-thought nature of Paradise Lost seems to support a version of Stanley Fish's classic argument, according to which the apparent waywardness of the poem is carefully calibrated to elicit just the right amount of waywardness from the reader so that he or she can be abruptly chastened. But, to take an example that is a different kind of classic, I number myself among those who read the fall of Mulciber in Paradise Lost—“lasting from noon to dewy eve / A summer's day”—as a moment in which Milton genuinely and spontaneously thinks himself into an eerie beauty and specificity of experience that goes beyond the didactic needs of the narrative and is in no way erased by the narrator's stern insistence that “thus they relate / Erring” (PL 1.742–43, 746–47). I am not suggesting that Teskey endorses Fish's account—indeed he critiques a version it in The Poetry of John Milton (393–94, focusing on Waldock's similar earlier reading of the narrator's “Vaunting aloud but racked with deep despair”). Rather, I have found that only by triangulating Fish's reading with Teskey's account of Milton's pre-thinking of his verse have I been able to develop my own sense of the spontaneous thinking that I do find happening in and through Paradise Lost. All I am really saying here is that my admiration for Teskey's work does not imply agreement at every turn: his unparalleled talent for concise critical characterization and aphoristic contrast demands and spurs engagement rather than acceptance; his openness to thought provokes open thought. This might be an obvious point, but it seems worth making, since the business of literary scholarship can sometimes feel like it demands blunt and binary choices: empirical minutiae or theoretical abstraction, historic expertise or critical sensibility, swallowing an idea whole or spitting it out unchewed. Teskey's work shows how ludicrous it would be to pick a team when it comes to Spenser and Milton, and the extent to which appreciating the achievements of either poet requires immersing oneself in the distinct vision of the other; he makes the picking of any of these other scholarly teams feel like an equally flimsy and unnecessary choice.