PLATONISM AND THE IDEA OF LOVE IN SPENSER'S MINOR POEMS

I would like to warn the possible audience of these considerations about the fact that I shall be mainly dealing with some very specific shorter poems by Edmund Spenser (*London, circa 1552- †Westminster, 1599), instead of quoting lavishly from his two longer works as it seems that contemporary readers of English Renaissance poetry appear to delight themselves in the sonnet collections and other shorter poems which thus would enable their readers to appreciate the spark of genius of their authors in very little time, though I would assume as well that they may also consider several of the great poetic achievements of the late Tudor period as rather cumbersome. Cumbersome because in most cases their frequent overwhelming extension hinders the possibility of reading them in just one quiet afternoon or in a dark and stormy night. Caveat emptor & co. Contemporary passion for saving time in any activity in order to devote it to some idle occupations, a passion that Elizabethans shared as well, is not the only reason responsible for the removing of these literary works to rather remote shelves of the present-day everyman’s library of poetic diction, reasonable poetry and sensible taste. I would like to remark that there is a good number of 16th and 17th century poems that constitute quite an ordeal even for the most biased amateur of verse, as these are representative of a world that has been fully discarded by modern fashion and by poetic usage. And I would even add that this phenomenon has happened especially after the singular devotion that a certain group of the English Romantic Poets felt for them, and after the essays of a swarm of critics influenced by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis’s ideas and opinions. Not t