Spenser's Anacreon: a new model for the new Poet?

Modern Philology, 2019

Visionary Spenser emerges from a resurgent interest in Spenser's relationship with Plato that led previously to a special issue of the annual Spenser Studies devoted to the topic in 2009, and which featured essays by a number of prominent Spenser scholars including Kenneth Borris, who was also one of the issue's editors. Though most of its analytic energy is trained on the works of Edmund Spenser, particularly The Shepheardes Calender (1579) and The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), the book will be of general interest to scholars of early modern literature and culture because of its wide-ranging claims for Plato's influence in the period, and how we can find, if not direct influence from Plato, then what he calls "Platonizing poetics" (1), in many more places than it has been found in the past. Indeed, Borris argues for a "line of vision" that can trace the influence of this poetics through Spenser, Milton, Blake, T. S. Eliot, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Borris is well aware that in the English Renaissance Plato himself is just as likely to be associated with the famous repudiation of poets in the Republic as with any positive poetics, and so a good deal of work is devoted to adding nuance to that repudiation and arguing that Plato there, but also in the Phaedrus, Ion, and Timaeus, leaves plenty of room for a poetics that his philosophy could authorize. Against that famous shunning of poets, Borris describes what a poetic exception could look like: "A responsible poet must articulate an ameliorative agenda attractively, so as to promote a higher vision excelling public norms and imaginatively enhance the aspirations of the community, even though this program will incur some resentment" (55). Subversion is acceptable then, so long as it is constructive. Moreover, Borris argues that such a poetry-positive interpretation of Plato Modern Philology, volume 116, number 3.

2009

In this paper, I propose to examine some of the ways in which Plato’s elaboration of transcendent love penetrated and influenced English Renaissance poetry, specifically Edmund Spenser’s, and to point out how certain accretions from Renaissance Neoplatonism may be said to have filtered into a specific literary expression, the ‘Hymne’. I shall attempt to offer a glimpse into the artistry of a poet who met the considerable challenge of encompassing philosophical doctrines into poetic structures and to show how the remarkable blend of apparently divergent beliefs, as presented by ancient and modern schools of thought, provided a rich array of ideas that could be exploited in poetical terms.

e-Colloquia 5 (2007-2208)

Classical Review, 2004

Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 2019

In his recently released Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism, Kenneth Borris accomplishes the rarely achieved scholarly task of harvesting a host of literary, philosophical, and theological sources into an extended argument focused on close textual analysis. A culmination of over three decades of Borris's own research into Edmund Spenser's multifarious use of Platonism, Visionary Spenser is a tour de force. Borris not only ably explores Spenser's immense oeuvre, but provides a much-needed overview of the development of early modern Platonic theory, thus contributing a capstone to the 21st-century effort to establish Spenser as a poet whose work is imbued with Platonic thought. Throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries, a war raged between two camps of Spenser scholars who attempted to gage the extent to which the great Tudor poet utilised the writings of Plato reintroduced to the West by the Florentine philosopher, priest, and occasional magus, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). As the 21st century has drawn on, however, a (relatively) firm scholarly consensus has developed among Spenser critics that the poet's work is saturated with Platonic ideas. The principal task scholars face at this juncture is to flesh out exactly what sort of Platonism Spenser uses in his work and how. Divided into three main sections, 'Platonic Poetics', 'The Shepheardes Calender', and 'The 1590 and 1596 Faerie Queene', Visionary Spenser performs the heroic task of taming two immense works of poetry-The Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene, the longest poem in the English language. Borris's focus is on the 'mystical' Plato largely fed to Renaissance European palates through Ficino-especially De amore and his commentaries of Plato. Borris makes short work of the theory proposed by some Spenser scholars that there was a dearth of Platonic text in Tudor England, noting that Elizabeth had some access to Ficino's translation of Plato's Opera Omnia through Spenser's teacher at the Merchant Taylor's School, Richard Mulcaster. Borris also lodges Spenser among those 16thcentury poets such as Philip Sidney who attempted via the ironic use of Plato to argue that poetry is morally licit.

2019

The boys are my gods”, what Anacreon says in an anecdote transmitted by the scholia to Pindar (Isthm. 2, 1b), symbolises a characteristic of his erotic poetry, at the heart of which are his pupils. The datum that Anacreon would have composed no hymns to gods can be explained in the light of both a narrow concept of “hymn” (celebration of gods) on the one hand, and a devaluation of Anacreon’s hymns on the other. Anacreon’s appearances here and throughout the tradition, together with Ibycus and Alcaeus – especially as a representative pederastic poet and/or in connection with musical subjects – lead back to the moral background of IV cent. BC within which the Peripatetic Aristoxenus of Tarentum appears to have played an important role.

American Journal of Philology, 2000