Spenser’s Petrarch

This essay calls for a fresh look at Spenser’s relationship to Petrarch—one that moves past a reliance on commonplace notions of “Petrarchism” to consider what exactly the English poet may have learned from his Italian predecessor. It thus explores what it might mean to identify Spenser as “post-Petrarchan”: to love and rival Vergil, to engage in intense literary self-reflection and autobiographical self-presentation, to reach for an international, multilingual audience engaged in cross-cultural and transhistorical dialogue, and to transform the lyric from a relatively minor literary genre to one that sought epic amplitude.