ABSTRACT
The history of psychological allegory after Prudentius’s day is largely that of the development of extended narrative. A battle, or more frequently a series of individual encounters, remains almost invariably at the heart of the action. The best known analysis by an English poet of his own psychological allegory is the Letter which Edmund Spenser addressed to Sir Walter Raleigh when in 1590 the first three books of the Faerie Queene were published. Spenser knew and accepted the allegorizations of Ariosto and the doctrine prefixed by Tasso to Gierusalemme Liberata. Spenser’s Letter notoriously contains its difficulties, but it remains not merely essential for any proper understanding of his own method and aims, but also relevant to the work of many English poets in the centuries which followed. John Milton, John Dryden, Pope, Thomson, William Wordsworth, Shelley and John Keats were all influenced by the doctrine as well as the poetry of Spenser.
