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date: 15 February 2019

Abstract and Keywords

This article analyzes Spenser's Fowre Hymnes and Prothalamion. Fowre Hymnes and Prothalamion show Spenser as a formal innovator, reminding us why later generations would send their verse to school with ‘the poet's poet’: generic conventions, stanzas, figures of speech, images, rhythms, and sounds are all for him concrete ways of thinking. Fowre Hymnes and Prothalamion offer contrasting demonstrations of this gift, but as poetic thinking they also share a common ground in their veiled concern with mourning. This is in many ways a surprising discovery, since neither of the poems is an elegy. But both contain elegiac motifs, and these are thrown into relief by Spenser's decision to republish a third poem — the pastoral elegy Daphnaïda (1591) — with the first edition of Fowre Hymnes.

Keywords: poems, poetry, mourning, elegy, poetic thinking

David Lee Miller

David Lee Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, where he directs the Centre for Digital Humanities. He is one of the five General Editors of the forthcoming The Oxford Edition of the Collected Works of Edmund Spenser. He is the author of The Poem's Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 ‘Faerie Queene’ (1988) and Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrificial Sons and the Father's Witness (2003). With Gregory Jay he co‐edited After Strange Texts: The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature (1985); with Alexander Dunlop, Approaches to Teaching Spenser's ‘Faerie Queene’ (1994); with Sharon O'Dair and Harold Weber, The Production of English Renaissance Culture (1994); and with Nina Levine, A Touch More Rare: Harry Berger, Jr. and the Arts of Interpretation (2009).

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