Examines and compares “The Faerie Queene” (Spenser) and “Paradise Lost” (Milton).
This paper analyzes and compares the style and form of “The Faerie Queene” and “Paradise Lost” and discusses how these two works compliment each other and influence future literary generations. The paper asserts that if read with patience, one can begin to understand the monumental contribution both have made in terms of showing the beauty, power and versatility of the English form, even when so constrained by the poetic epic style.
“Spenser uses his own rhyming poetic construction, Spenserian stanza, “a verse….that contains eight ten-syllable lines plus a ninth of twelve syllables…an iambic rhythm and rhyme scheme as follows ababbc bcc”(Davies 996). Milton, on the other hand using a non-rhyming “blank verse”–the same used by Shakespeare–that is a verse normally composed of 10 syllables and have the stress on every second syllable and is in the classic iambic pentameter (Davies 415). The purpose of both poems is to educate and delight. Both works employ the same techniques metaphorical and allegorical language that sifts through the poems giving to each the epitome of the specific epic form used. own epic form.
“Again, even though Spenser’s is less of an epic than Milton’s, both are classified as “secondary epics” because they do not take place near the same time they are written. The setting is Heaven and Hell and the topic a Christian one: the fall of man: Milton uses literary devices similar to those used in Greek epic poems: invocations and extended similes do aid in his construction of a specific verse language that buttresses the foundation of his epic.”
“Again, even though Spenser’s is less of an epic than Milton’s, both are classified as “secondary epics” because they do not take place near the same time they are written. The setting is Heaven and Hell and the topic a Christian one: the fall of man: Milton uses literary devices similar to those used in Greek epic poems: invocations and extended similes do aid in his construction of a specific verse language that buttresses the foundation of his epic.”