| Critics have long recognized the presence and importance of optical references in English Renaissance poetry, but to date a comprehensive study of optical allusions within their proper historical and intellectual contexts does not exist. This work provides a context for understanding the copious and varied use of eye imagery in several poems by Edmund Spenser and John Milton. At first, poetic allusions to the eye may seem random and inconsequential, especially to modern readers unfamiliar with early theories of vision and the various religious, medical, social, and intellectual contexts in which they circulated during the English Renaissance. When considered by way of their Hellenic and Hebraic contexts, however, references to the eye follow two distinct traditions: one laudatory, the other deprecatory. The laudatory tradition extols the eye as the premier bodily organ; the deprecatory tradition censures the eye as the locus of corruption. By tracing the roots of these two traditions and their Renaissance manifestations, the present work concludes that eye imagery in poetic texts imparted significant cultural meaning to Renaissance audiences, and that they were at times invoked by poets as a means of signifying ideas and attitudes related to contemporary religious, social, and political polemics. |
