“Weak powres of passions”: Spenser with Sianne Ngai

Abstract

This essay examines the poet-speaker’s performances of helplessness and pitifulness in Spenser’s Amoretti as an example of Sianne Ngai’s conceptualization of the minor aesthetic category of “cuteness.” In reading Amoretti with Sianne Ngai’s work, this essay argues that Spenser employs a cute poetics to create more proximity between the poet-speaker and his beloved than is typical of other contemporary sonnets. This essay also considers the cuteness of Amoretti as a material object and how the sequence’s paratexts similarly employ cute poetics in managing affective relationships between Spenser, his patrons, and his readers. In reading Amoretti as a collection of poetically cute works and as a cute commodity, this essay ruminates on what critique study of Spenser offers to Ngai’s arguments about cute aesthetics and emotional responses to cute objects.