Squitter-Wits and Muse-Haters: Sidney, Spenser, Milton and Renaissance Antipoetic Sentiment.

Peter C. Herman. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. 284 pp. $28.95. ISBN 0-8143-2571-8.

This useful, provocative book explores the thorny issue of how allusions to poetry and myth function in Sidney's Apology for Poetry and Astrophil and Stella, Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar and The Faerie Queene, and Milton's early poems. Herman argues that endemic to the English Reformation was an animus against the leisure (otium) and mental resources required to write poetry. He amply documents distrust of the imagination in the works of William Tyndale, John Foxe, Stephen Gosson, William Perkins and many other Reformationists. As if inadvertent witnesses for the prosecution, the three poets were also beleaguered from within by doubts about the moral validity of poetry.

The introduction and the first of six chapters richly portray Protestant scorn for poetry, memorably called by one reformer, "but the mushroom conception of idle brains," John Melton's fanciful description numerously cited from Russell Fraser's The War Against Poetry. Indeed, much of the reforming invective instanced by Herman, usually drawing from primary English sources, unwittingly shows poetic license in its metaphorical terms of abuse. How are we to read similar treatments of poetry in the works of the poets?

Herman's straightforward thesis regarding a pervasive contempt of poetry as "mannes phantasies" (43) allows him to dwell methodically in chapters 2 through 6 upon the negative side of this vexed question, the poets' fears and anxieties about the chimerical, Archimago-like processes of the imagination. Sidney's argument in The Apology displays a "self-consumption" while his sonnets replicate "the self- idolization of the imagination" that so worried Tyndale (83, 95). Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar exhibits "tensions" between a desire for "Orphic power" and a Protestant disdain for human presumption (143); The Faerie Queene often confuses the identity of good and bad knights in battle and treats even good art as an aspiration devoutly to be avoided, with the Bower of Bliss a conspicuous example of "successful imitatio" (161). Comus represents both "wrong and right uses of the imagination" while the Lady rejects the imagination "wholesale" (193). "Lycidas" presents "a series of voices" not answering Milton's grave doubts about song (206). In writing, the poets acted "somewhat like a moth to the flame," poetry an alluring but dubious good at best (207).

This well defended thesis I find partly right. We ought to read such a "trenchant example" (157) of poetry's ambiguous value as Spenser's Malfont in terms of the Protestant war on image-making and the poet's endorsement of it. However, even the Malfont episode is a negative foil against which to measure poetry's radiant achievements for virtue's cause. Dwelling on poetry's wanton negativity alone never allows us to leave the wood of error, gloriously not the only landscape available even if one must begin the journey there. Rejecting the imagination proves metaphorical because of the faculty's irrepressible constitutive power, an irony and dynamic that the poets explore time and again.

To be sure, this clearly written and abundantly documented book recommends itself to many readers who should take it on eagerly, prompting a critical reperusal of weighty texts as it does.

ANTHONY DIMATTEO New York Institute of Technology