Milton and Spenser: The Virgilian Triad Revisited

Milton's statement to Dryden "that Spencer was his Original" might lead one to believe that he lived on fairly good terms with his literary father and, like Shakespeare, belonged to that "giant age before the flood, before the anxiety of influence became central to poetic consciousness." But Harold Bloom has lately come up with an exactly opposite conclusion and in so doing confirmed Milton's own apprehension that he might belong to "an age too late." And if that age did not, as Milton feared, damp his intended wing, it has nonetheless brought him a flood of unanticipated ills, among them the "dissociation of sensibility" and, now, a literary oedipus complex that condemned him "to struggle, subtly and crucially, with a major precursor in Spenser."1 This idea recommends itself if only by its contrast with Milton's bland words to Dryden. All the same, one would like to have some evidence of the struggle and the ways it "both formed and malformed Milton." Since Bloom provides none, it might be reasonable or at any rate safer to assume that the relationship between the two poets was somewhat less dramatic than he asserts, and to inquire instead what Milton meant when he called Spenser his "original," a notion that may after all present plenty of complications of its own. Accordingly I shall begin with a familiar fact of literary history which, if it does not show that Spenser was Milton's original, at least indicates a point of agreement between the two. Spenser and Milton evidently shared the Renaissance reverence for the epic as the supreme poetic genre and were inspired by the example of Virgil, who had summed up his poet's progress in verses introductory to the Aeneid: