{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.019404019404019403, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.224137931034483, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Making Free with Poetry: Spenser and the Rhetoric of Choice

Milton is generally credited as the champion of individual liberty, but his acknowledged master Spenser provided Milton with his first model for a poetry that values and seeks to extend human freedom. Spenser claims throughout his work that making true poetry is an exercise in freedom and an invitation to the free spirit. Despite the imperial ideal Spenser derives from Virgil and from Elizabethan colonial aspirations, ideas of freedom wash through key portions of his work, moving across intersections of social hierarchy, law, religion, love, and English identity. He employs traditional limited definitions of freedom as “not slavery” and “generosity of spirit,” but extends them to include the poet’s right to speak freely. In Mother Hubberds Tale and throughout The Faerie Queene Spenser can be found subverting stated assumptions about hierarchy and governance, and redefining freedom as knowledgeable choice and a condition for virtue. His rhetorical technique is to show and invite rather than tell and exhort, in keeping with the Protestant focus on the individual. This vision and technique culminate in Book VI, which presents the most direct encounter between poet and his courtly reader. Here, particularly in the Mt. Acidale episode, Spenser presents his vision of freedom most clearly as a paradox of revelation through disguise and invitation through instruction.