5 hours ago
If the end of this week doesn't kill me, I'll have finished reading The Faerie Queene. Solid poem. I especially liked book three---I really like heroic women---and the present book, with its pastorals. Book five was an interesting example of why having bad politics tends to mean being a bad poet, and not in the way Shakespeare's early plays kinda suck: the allegory becomes way too obvious, and not in the intented meta-commentary in book two. Generally his style is a really good study for anyone wanting to write poetry in general, since he has a very strong command of all the little details that goes into the art. Even the fact that his diction is so antiquated is to his advantage, because in his case the language was antiquated even for his time: he was deliberately echoing Chaucer and the like, deliberately hearkening back to when knights and "damzells in distresse" were so common a sight---to when the bounds between Faerie and the world as we know it seemed much looser---so, for one, his poetry gets to feel about as universal as the Authorized Version of the Bible, compared to how Shakespeare's use of contemporary slang often needs a solid amount of footnotes to fully grok; and, for another, one gets a better feel for how to use one's diction to communicate a point, one (hopefully) gets to write in more varied ways than your usual "antiquated" or "natural". If I had one true criticism of his work overall, it's that he just doesn't have as strong a sense of character as some of his fellow greats: none of his heroes or villains work as full-fledged people, unlike all the characters with which Shakespeare or Dante pepper their masterpieces (even the mere cameos!). Maybe his women, but that might just be my bias making me more sympathetic to them.