Vision and Rhetoric

The subject of this paper is not a new one, but only in quite recent years has it received extended investigation, by Professor Robert Durling, by Professor Paul Alpers, and less directly by other scholars. My attempt here is limited to emphasising certain aspects of a topic on which important work has already been done: the relation Spenser sets up between the poet, the poem, and the reader of the poem as this is seen in passages of direct address and comment. This is a matter especially pressing in romance-epic, where so much and such complex material is to be presented by the poet and comprehended by the reader, and only in The Faerie Queene is the placing of poet and poem in relation to the reader and to the world of the actual in which poet, poem, and reader alike are rooted, fully developed. But Spenser's work as a whole shows his continuing concern with it. For him it appears to be not only a question of how to handle the poetnarrator in one rather specialised poetic form but one of the essential problems of poetic communication, and part of his strategy for solving it is to keep the reader aware of it as a problem, and one which concerns him as well as the poet. Writers on The Faerie Queene have properly stressed Spenser'.s presentation of it as vision. The events of Faeryland are as if shown to the poet, and at the same time the poet's own vision must be undistorted and clear enough to bring them into focus. As he moves into regions less well charted than those of the first two books his seeing and ours becomes correspondingly more difficult, until in the sixth book, with its deliberate likeness in event, and difference in effect, as compared with the fifth, he can so handle his fiction that it embodies what he has been suggesting: that though a poet may be given a vision, and may in his turn give that vision to the reader, what poet or reader sees will depend partly on the quality of his sight. What we make of a world, actual or poetic, depends, as Pope was to say, as much on ' the

Aesthetics · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Rhetoric · Literature, Politics, and Exile Studies · Philosophy · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

• Another game in vew

  Open Access•José Ángel García Landa•Revista Alicantina de Estudios…•1989

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