Milton’s Spenser: Eden and the Work of Poetry

Abstract

This essay reads Milton’s Eden as a critical appropriation of Spenser’s image of the mutable world. It argues that Edenic work epitomizes Milton’s engagement with Spenser’s poetry as a site of creative origins and reveals these poets’ common vision of poetry’s virtues as inseparable from individual experiences of freely interpreting images of creation. Linking Spenserian quest’s redemptive labor with the first parents’ work in Eden, it argues that Spenser bequeaths to Milton’s poetry a broadly georgic ethos in which virtue is discovered not in our encounters with transcendent forms but rather in our movements through the postlapsarian world.