Chaucer, Spenser, Milton: Mythopoeic Continuities and Transformations

The study of sources and influences can be a strained, trivializing, and dull process, yet no lover of literature can ignore the shaping power of a great poet on his successors, nor fail to be fascinated by the ways in which the greatest of these successors transmute their inheritance into greatly individual and new poetry. Daniel's Musophilus is tentative in claiming a part in the process for his own lines, but is passionately convinced of the validity of the process itself: When as perhaps the words thou scornest now May live, the speaking picture of the mind, The extract of the soule that laboured how To leave the image of her selfe behind, Wherein posteritie that love to know The just proportion of our spirits may find. For these lines are the vaines, the Arteries, And undecaying life-strings of those harts That still shall pant, and still shall exercise The motion spirit and nature both imparts, And shall, with those alive so sympathize As nourisht with their powers injoy their parts. O blessed letters that combine in one All ages past, and make one live with all, By you we do confer with who are gone, And the dead living unto councell call... Any individual who has attempted to define his own essence by exploring the intricate web of heredity and environment that has shaped him knows how complicated an analytical process this is, yet knows too that the effort can illuminate both the thing affecting and the thing affected. So the critic who seeks to explore the life-strings of poetic heredity must perceive the just E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , rv, 4 , Winter 19 7 8 469 proportion of affecting and affected to discern the nature of the sympathy between those of great powers and parts.