ABSTRACT
Although Crabbe repudiated the eighteenth-century pastoral tradition with its Spenserian roots, he nevertheless read and admired Spenser’s poetry from an early age. Throughout his life, moreover, he continued to experiment with the Spenserian stanza. In his biography of his father, Crabbe’s son notes that among his father’s juvenilia is a poem entitled The Judgment of the Muse, in the Metre of Spenser.’ In Silford Hall (a verse tale written shortly before his death and collected in Posthumous Tales), Crabbe himself points to his early reading of Spenser by including a partly autobiographical character who read Spenser (among many other authors and books) as a youth. His first published poem noticeably influenced by Spenser is The Birth of Flattery’ (1807), which contains an address to the ‘muse of my Spenser, who so well could sing/The passions all, their bearings and their ties;/ Who could in view those shadowy beings bring,/And with bold hand remove each dark disguise,/Wherein love, hatred, scorn, or anger lies’ (ed 1905-7, 1:224). In further tribute, Crabbe revises the couplets in which these lines appear in manuscript, providing a pair of Spenserian stanzas before continuing with his customary heroic couplets for the remainder of the poem.
