The Encyclopedia Americana; A Library of Universal Knowledge Volume 25 - Tapa blanda

Sinopsis

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1920 edition. Excerpt: ...into 12. The allegory of the Puritan's "battle between the Spirit and evil lusts"--error, hypocrisy, pride, despair,--"the chief and principal work of faith, the battle of the Spirit against the flesh (the "Old Dragon"),--the comforting by divine Truth (Una) of his soul overcome by Despair,--the necessary mediation of divine Grace (Arthur)--all this is already adumbrated in Tyndale's 'Prologue upon the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans' (republished in Works, 1573). Spenser's problem was to express this eclectic system through a romanic narrative itself constructed from many sources--Classic, Mediaeval, Renaissance--the personages of which should represent its categories, and their ordered adventures its dialectic; and, at the same time, also to "shadow forth," as through a double veil, the religious, political and contemporary social history of England. No other European poet except Dante had essayed so prodigious a task; and Spenser may have been emulating Dante. But the English poet was infinitely less happy in his medium: the cloudily shifting scenes, monotonous ill-motivated exploits, vaguely or externally differentiated characters of popular chivalric fiction offered but a poor substitute for the Tuscan's accurately symbolic, yet localizable and tangible other world of nicely discriminated human realities. The curiously protean poem, however, even in its weakness, was nicely calculated to contemporary taste. It had something for all,--high if vague doctrine for thinkers,--classical learning and Italianate elegance for scholar and dilettante,--romantic story, graphic picture, piquant gossip for courtier or fine lady; and the cultivated Elizabethan often united in himself all these moods. Spenser...

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