Spenser, Chaucer, and the Rhetoric of Elegy

Author / Editor
Martin, Ellen E.

Title
Spenser, Chaucer, and the Rhetoric of Elegy

Published
Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17 (1987): 83-109.

Description
BD is an "open-ended legend of imagination in which grief is accepted rather than eradicated...(Its) main theme is the reanimation of imagination." It proceeds by "structures of inconsequence that draw attention away from theme to poetic method." Both Chaucer and Spenser (in "Daphnaida") "find in this shaking of the sense of viable self an occasion and emblem for the losses imagination endures as a condition of writing poetry." Brief notice is taken of SqT and Th as influences on the "Faerie Queene."

Chaucer Subjects
Book of the Duchess.
Chaucer's Influence and Later Allusion.