poetry

This is the second edition of the best version of The Faerie Queene available. It is a marked improvement over the first edition. For one thing, you can actually read the type. The first edition looked like it was mimeographed (for those of you who remember what that looked like). The layout is now much better, and the notes (on the same page and with the same size font as the text) and cross references remain indispensable for anyone not born in 1600.

I would have to disagree with the reviewer that called Spenser's epic "fun" to read... it is a lot of work, not only because of the length but because of the archaisms involved in Spenserian diction. On the other hand the work is definitely fruitful, one finds passages of indelible beauty and insight. For scholarly criticism I would recommend the Oxford edition ("Poetical Works") with an introduction by E. de Selincourt: he often points out just the stanza or two that helps place the entire poem into a new perspective. Make no mistake about it, the Spenserian stanza (ababbcbcc) is a difficult read, whether one is talking Byron's "Childe Harold" or Novak's "Requiem": in all cases (I would say) a significant amount of effort is required, simply to follow the train of the author's thought, which, because of the difficult nature of the stanza perhaps, is not necessarily clearly linear... but in the long run, MAKE NO MISTAKE the effort is clearly worth it, and Spenser, if not exactly conforming to one's expectations, will not exactly disappoint them either. A worthwhile read, even in bits and pieces, if you cannot adhere to the storyline as a whole.

There's no question that this is a lot of book for the money, and it's an essential volume for the serious student. The introductory matter is a disappointment, though; instead of guiding us into this massive work with a view to our gaining pleasure from it (and above all else, Spenser is _fun_ to read), Hamilton gives us a dense and barely readable collection of quotations from other critics and cross-references to scholarly papers. Many of the footnotes in the text suffer from the same kind of high-priestly scholarship, mixed with a tendency to ferret out sexual symbolism wherever it can be found. There is plenty of information in the notes to clear up the inevitable confusion modern readers must experience, but at times one wishes a giant could wield a club without the accompaniment of chattering from a tribe of commentators about phalluses and biblical parallels. In short, this volume contains all that is good and all that is bad about "literary criticism".