The name inscribed in large letters on the standard of the new school was not Shakspere but Spenser. If there is any poet who is _par excellence_ the poet of romance, whose art is the antithesis of Pope's, it is the poet of the "Faërie Queene." To ears that had heard from childhood the tinkle of the couplet, with its monotonously recurring rhyme, its inevitable caesura, its narrow imprisonment of the sense, it must have been a relief to turn to the amplitude of Spencer's stanza, "the full strong sail of his great verse." To a generation surfeited with Pope's rhetorical devices--antithesis, climax, anticlimax--and fatigued with the unrelaxing brilliancy and compression of his language; the escape from epigrams and point (snap after snap, like a pack of fire-crackers), from a style which has made his every other line a proverb or current quotation--the escape from all this into Spenser's serene, leisurely manner, copious Homeric similes, and lingering detail must have seemed most restful. To go from Pope to Spenser was to exchange platitudes, packed away with great verbal cunning in neat formulas readily portable by the memory, for a wealth of concrete images: to exchange saws like,
"A little learning is a dangerous thing,"
for a succession of richly colored pictures by the greatest painter among English poets. It was to exchange the most prosaic of our poets--a poet about whom question has arisen whether he is a poet at all--for the most purely poetic of our poets, "the poet's poet." And finally, it was to exchange the world of everyday manners and artificial society for an imaginary kingdom of enchantment, "out of space, out of time."
English poetry has oscillated between the poles of Spenser and Pope. The poets who have been accepted by the race as most truly national, poets like Shakspere, Milton, and Byron, have stood midway. Neither Spenser nor Pope satisfies long. We weary, in time, of the absence of passion and intensity in Spenser, his lack of dramatic power, the want of actuality in his picture of life, the want of brief energy and nerve in his style; just as we weary of Pope's inadequate sense of beauty. But at a time when English poetry had abandoned its true function--the refreshment and elevation of the soul through the imagination--Spenser's poetry, the poetry of ideal beauty, formed the most natural corrective. Whatever its deficiencies, it was not, at any rate, "conceived and composed in his wits."