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“The Death of the ‘New Poete’: Virgilian Ruin and Ciceronian Recollection in Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Rebeca Helfer
Rebeca Helfer*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Abstract

This essay explores Virgil's influence in Renaissance poetry through the literature's most common trope, that of ruin; specifically, it examines the complexity of Virgilian imitation in Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender through an exploration of its introduction by his anonymous first critic, E.K. Through the topos of ruin, this essay reconsiders Virgil's legacy in the Calender, suggesting that critics have underestimated Spenser's criticism of Virgil's authorial pattern. Rather than reconstructing Virgil's model of cultural transmission — that of ruin and repair—Spenser presents the Ciceronian art of memory as a competing model for the architecture of immortality, for building upon the ruins of the past.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , Autumn 2003 , pp. 723 - 756
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2003

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Anne Lake Prescott, Edward Tayler, and Patrick Cheney for their enormous help with this essay. Many thanks also to Leonard Barkan and Jean Howard for reading and commenting on early versions. My undying gratitude to Ian Munro, who patiently read this essay more times than anyone should have had to.

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