Spenser, Ronsard, and DuBellay

Although it has been recognized that Edmund Spenser's poetry owes a debt to the work of the French poets of the Pléiade, particularly to Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard, there has been no critical analysis of this relationship. Mr. Satterthwaite compares the work of the three poets, showing the relation between the English movement to write quantitative verse and the French experiments in vers mesures. He discusses the attitudes of the poets to their Muses and to contemporary literature, their ideas of time and mutability, their moral (or amoral) views of literature and of life their religious orientation, and their use of the Platonic and neo-Platonic theories that were a part of the inherited culture of the Renaissance.

Originally published in 1960.

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