The Calender’s Visions of Beauty

By reconsidering the main female exemplars of beauty in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, this chapter shows that the admiration of beauty is central there, as it is also in early modern Platonic poetics. As in the Phaedrus, beauty for Spenser inspires visionary apprehension; yet unlike Plato the poet links this stimulus to literary pursuit of the sublime. Platonism associated genuine beauty with truth and goodness, and Spenser likewise assumes that his Calender’s esthetic disclosures foster wisdom and virtue in at least some readers, and hence in the nation. However, whereas Plato valorizes philosophy for illuminating truth, Spenser advocates the enraptured poetic imagination endued with learning. In doing so, he seeks to circumvent, insofar as possible, the intrinsic limitations of words, images, and written discourse, such as those that Plato had identified in the Phaedrus. This reading newly illuminates the strategies of Spenser’s visionary poetics.