Spenser's Garden of Adonis

Abstract

Spenser's conception of the organization of the universe, as it is set forth in the allegory of the garden of Adonis, and in the Mutability cantos, has recently been given considerable attention. Professor Edwin Greenlaw opened the subject with the suggestion that the poet owed part of the ideas developed in these two passages to Lucretius. Several objections have been made to his theory. M. Denis Saurat points out some inconsistencies in Professor Greenlaw's interpretation, and prefers to regard the passage on the garden of Adonis as lyrical and without serious or sustained philosophic content. Professor Ronald B. Levinson finds Spenser's theory of form and matter in Bruno's Spaccio. Miss Evelyn Albright draws attention to the inconsistency between the Platonic idealism of The Fowre Hymnes (together with certain passages in Colin Clout's Come Home A gaine) and any Lucretian materialism in The Faerie Queene. To these critics Professor Greenlaw replied, in effect, that no one had disproved his contention of Lucretian influence in the passage on the garden of Adonis, and that the well-known eclecticism of the Renaissance accounts for the mixture of Platonic and Lucretian philosophy in Spenser.