The
poets of Italy, Spain, and France began to rain influence and to modify
and refine not only style but vocabulary. Men were discovering new worlds
in more senses than one, and the visionary finger of expectation still
pointed forward. There was, as we learn from contemporary pamphlets, very
much the same demand for a national literature that we have heard in
America. This demand was nobly answered in the next generation. But no
man contributed so much to the transformation of style and language as
Spenser; for not only did he deliberately endeavor at reform, but by the
charm of his diction, the novel harmonies of his verse, his ideal method
of treatment, and the splendor of his fancy, he made the new manner
popular and fruitful. We can trace in Spenser's poems the gradual growth
of his taste through experiment and failure to that assured
self-confidence which indicates that he had at length found out the true
bent of his genius,--that happiest of discoveries (and not so easy as it
might seem) which puts a man in undisturbed possession of his own
individuality. Before his time the boundary between poetry and prose had
not been clearly defined. His great merit lies not only in the ideal
treatment with which he glorified common things and gilded them with a
ray of enthusiasm, but far more in the ideal point of view which he first
revealed to his countrymen.
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