An Interpretation of Edmund Spenser's Colin Clout

"Sam Meyer presents an interpretive reading of Edmund Spenser's pastoral allegory Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, written while the poet resided at his estate of Kilcolman Castle, County Cork, Ireland, and dedicated in 1591 to Sir Walter Raleigh. This first full-length study considers the poem for its intrinsic literary merit. The book gives major attention to conventions, attitudes, and understandings which influenced writings of the Renaissance. It demonstrates clearly the poem's unity of design and theme. Meyer's method develops certain new outlooks on the poem: the cardinal roles of the abundant rhetorical figures in building up blocks of verse; the intimate relationship between the vocabulary and the prosody; the use of imagery, formulated by logic-taught modes, to objectify concepts and to symbolize values; and the dramatic quality of the poem and the emotional vibrancy of the speeches of Colin. Meyer discovers that, despite its manifest elements of autobiography and history, the fundamental orientation of the poem is imaginative. He shows how the last human values which the poem explores confer upon it a truly universal quality." -Publisher.