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On Not Defending Poetry: Spenser, Suffering, and the Energy of Affect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Joseph Campana
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Abstract

Early modern defenses of poetry, such as Philip Sidney's influential Defence of Poesy, respond to long-standing anxieties about the validity of poetry by asserting the primacy of its moral function. Sidney's heroic rhetoric locates poetry's “power” in its capacity to create iconic portraits (“speaking pictures”) of unchanging moral truths. Edmund Spenser departs markedly from Sidney's static moral vision of the function of poetry. Whereas Sidney privileges enargeia, or vividness, The Faerie Queene works consistently to disarm the heroic masculinity that violently produces enargeia as a form of iconic, moral clarity. Spenser's Legend of Temperance finds energeia, or vitality, in moments of suffering and in corresponding moments of sympathy. Through suffering, Spenser highlights the dense networks of affect and obligation that defy moral and visual clarity. For him, poetry resonates with the affective energies of corporeal experience, from which language derives its capacity to move.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 120 , Issue 1: Special Topic: On Poetry , January 2005 , pp. 33 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

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