The Springs of Helicon; A Study in the Progress of English Poetry from Chaucer to Milton - Softcover

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This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1909. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... a new and adventurous voyage. That age, like our own, went almost madover education; and Spenser represents not only the enlarged outlook and heightened ambitions of the new world, but also its rich scholarship. He went to Cambridge at seventeen, and studied there for seven years; it was an education almost as full and elaborate as Milton's or Virgil's. There he lived among a circle of ardent scholars, and received that bent towards classicism, as classicism was then understood, which is one of the main threads of influence that run through the whole of his poetry. That classicism of the sixteenth century was a very mixed and intricate thing. On one side, following the great Italian humanists, it plunged deeply into Plato and the Platonic school. On another, Ovid was its master, and it sought to reinstate the brilliance, the dexterity, the accomplishment, which the Graeco-Roman civilisation had reached before it fell into decay. On yet another, it read largely and deeply in ancient history, to gain knowledge of the past which might be applied to actual life, and to recover what it described in a compendious phrase as the wisdom of the ancients. On literature it had an influence for both good and evil. The fatal tendency of classicism is to see life through books, and to take it at second hand. Its natural instinct I is to copy, and in doing so, to copy .the inferior classics, who are more copiable, and then to go on copying itself. Its scholarship tends towards pedantry; its poets tend to become rhetoricians. The influence of Ovid colours the whole mass of Elizabethan poetry; that of Seneca greatly hampered the growth of the English drama. Bembo and Politian were ranked as masters alongside of Virgil. "The tragedies of Buchanan do justly bring forth a d...

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