Spenser and Milton

Edmund Spenser and John Milton: the two Protestant epic bards of English literature, from whom great English literature since has sprung.

Coleridge, Keats, Blake, Byron, Dickens, Melville, Hawthorne - all these have taken from the wellspring of Spenser and Milton.

The Faerie Queene is one of the most renowned epic romances, and Paradise Lost the English language's greatest epic (not including Chapman's Homer, Pope's Homer, Dryden's Iliad, and Arthur Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses).

The Faerie Queene, by the way, is respected by Camille Paglia, Harold Bloom, George Saintsbury, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, C. S. Lewis, and was even, to my knowledge, influential to Shakespeare and Milton in significant ways.

Whom then do you prefer?

Camille Paglia, in Sexual Personae, has effectively ranked Spenser over Milton, arguing that Milton's attempt to combat Spenser's visual Apollonian impulse via word-fetishism has failed to exceed the grandeur of Spenser.

When I had contacted Harold Bloom about this, he ranked Spenser just below Milton, though he loves both. And it seems that the literary world, while loving both, has generally preferred Milton's high grandness to Spenser's luxuriant yet dreamlike visual fancy.

So whom do you find greater? And why? In style, form, themes, general influence, etc.?

If you prefer Paradise Lost to Faerie Queene, and vice versa, why?

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at http://ift.tt/jcXqJW.
Recommended article from FiveFilters.org: Most Labour MPs in the UK Are Revolting.

Spenser and Milton