Spenser's Impact on Keats and Shelley.

Abstract

This dissertation measures Spenser's congenial impact on Keats and Shelley within a context of more threatening encounters between Romantic and Renaissance poets. Major Romantic writers sought to innovate upon their forebears while also perpetuating artistic traditions endangered by nineteenth-century disruptions. Recent influence critics have shown the importance of such efforts for Romantic and post-Romantic aesthetics. The more anxious of these readings stress Romantic responses to Milton and their accompanying intimidation. My study argues, in contrast, for Spenser's salutary impact on Keats and Shelley. It finds this beneficent influence enabling their successful integration of Spenserian art with modern innovation. Chapter One outlines new ideas of Spenser in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that subordinated his Christian ethos to his aesthetic strengths. It shows how this new emphasis, focusing on Spenser's poetic opulence, didactic zeal, and psychological insight, helped Keats and Shelley to modify Spenserian traditions along secular lines. Chapter Two identifies Keats's division between the views of poetic opulence and psychological insight in early works like Calidore and Endymion. Chapter Three follows his advancement toward a fusion of both ideas in The Eve of St. Agnes and The Cap and Bells. The remaining two chapters trace Shelley's growth from ideas of Spenserian didacticism in Queen Mab and The Revolt of Islam to notions of Spenser's psychological probing in Prometheus Unbound and Adonais. They juxtapose his development with Keats's and find parallel efforts to rework Spenserian images, concepts, and prosodic structures. They also reveal how Shelley's longer and more sustained development culminated in the age's greatest revision of Spenserian art, Adonais. My study of these progressions bears a threefold purpose: it defines Spenser's unique importance for post-Renaissance writers generally, and for Keats and Shelley in particular; it reveals the coherent development of responses to literary tradition in major and peripheral works of Keats and Shelley often thought unrelated; and finally, it qualifies influence theories of literary intimidation by arguing for Spenser's beneficent impact on Keats and Shelley while showing the priority they gave to preserving even when transforming literary tradition.