Edmund Spenser

Andrew Hadfield

Abraham Dylan Stoll

Carol V. Kaske

Dorothy Stephens

Erik Irving Gray

Part of a series of volumes, each of which provide one book of Spenser's great work, a concise general Introduction, annotation, Spenser's letter to Raleigh, a short “Life of Spenser,” note on the text, bibliography, glossary, and an index of characters.

The Faerie Queene

Part of a series of Spenser's great work in five volumes. Each includes its own general introduction, annotation, note on the text, bibliography, glossary, and an index of characters; Spenser's Letter to Raleigh and a short Life of Spenser appear in every volume.

Indifference is a common, even indispensable element of human experience. But it is rare in poetry, which is traditionally defined by its direct opposition to indifference--by its heightened emotion, consciousness, and effort. This definition applies especially to English poets of the nineteenth century, heirs to an age that predicated aesthetics on moral sentiment or feeling. Yet it was in this period, Erik Gray argues, that a concentrated strain of poetic indifference began to emerge. The Poetry of Indifference analyzes nineteenth-century works by Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Edward FitzGerald, among others--works that do not merely declare themselves to be indifferent but formally enact the indifference they describe. Each poem consciously disregards some aspect of poetry that is usually considered to be crucial or definitive, even at the risk of seeming indifferent in the sense of mediocre. Such gestures discourage critical attention, since the poetry of indifference refuses to make claims for itself. This is particularly true of FitzGerald's Rubáiyát, one of the most popular poems of the nineteenth century, but one that recent critics have almost entirely ignored. In concentrating on this underexplored mode of poetry, Gray not only traces a major shift in recent literary history, from a Romantic poetics of sympathy to a Modernist poetics of alienation, but also considers how this literature can help us understand the sometimes embarrassing but unavoidable presence of indifference in our lives.

Erik Irving Gray

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