“I am not arguing that [Edmund] Spenser was not a Calvinist. A priori it is very likely that he was. But his poetry is not so written as to enable us to pick out his own beliefs in distinct separation from kindred beliefs. When a modern writer is didactic he endeavours, like Shaw or M. Sartre, to throw his own ‘ideas’ into sharp relief, distinguishing them from the orthodoxy which he wants to attack. Spenser is not at all like that . . . in general he is concerned with agreements, not differences” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century, p. 386).
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