Spenser's Famous Flight ― A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career

In Spensers' Famous Flight, Patrick Cheney challenges the received wisdom about the shape and goal of Spenser's literary career. He contends that Spenser's idea of a literary career is not strictly the conventional Virgilian pattern of pastoral to epic, but a Christian revision of that pattern in light of Petrarch and the Reformation.
Spenser begins his literary career with pastoral in The Shepheardes Calender and follows with the first instalment of his epic The Faerie Queene, but then inserts the Petrarchan love lyric, represented by Amoretti and Epithalamion, as a genre of renewal so that he can continue his epic; and eventually he turns from these courtly forms to a contemplative one, the Augustinian-based Fowre Hymnes. In the October eclogue he prophesies his four-genre career, of which the highest goal is an alignment of the Virgilian telos of poetry, fame, with the Augustinian telos of the Christian life, glory. The Petrarchan erotic genre exercises a revolutionary bridging power in that alignment. Cheney demonstrates that, far from changing his mind about his career as a result of disillusionment, Spenser embarks upon and completes a daring progress that secures his status as an Orphic poet.
In October, Spenser calls his idea of a literary career the 'famous flight.' Both classical and Christian culture had authorized the myth of the winged poet as a primary myth of fame and glory. Cheney shows that throughout his poetry Spenser relies on an image of flight to accomplish his highest goal.

Patrick Cheney is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University.