Spenser’s Neoplatonic Geography of the Passions: Mapping Allegory in the “Legend of Temperance,” Faerie Queene, Book II

Spenser’s Sprites: Platonic Daemons in The Faerie Queene

“…28 Drawing from Plato's Phaedrus and, to a lesser degree, the Symposium and Ion, Renaissance poets and theorists of poetry crafted a view of poetry as, in the words of Jean de Serres, a "divinely enraptured representation" 29 that sprang from what Italian theorist Cesar Ripa called a "divine furor. " 30 For Spenser's contemporary Sir Philip Sidney, whose circle, according to Catherine Gemelli Martin, was affected by the "hermetic philosophy" 31 of Ficino and Bruno, a poet has the ability to craft a "golden world" from the "zodiac of his own wit, " which itself imitates God's creative act. 32 As Guenther notes, in his Defense of Poesy Sidney "sounds almost exactly like Cornelius Agrippa […] who in Three Books of Occult Philosophy vaunts the adept's power to ascend in to a transcendent realm of Platonic Ideas, whose representation, Agrippa argues, can transform social and even material life. "…”