SOURCE: “The Argument of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender,” in ELH, Vol. 23, No. 3, September 1956, pp. 171-82.
In the following essay, Hamilton explores the larger meaning of Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender—which he claims is the rejection of the pastoral life for the truly dedicated life in the world—by examining not what the poem has in common with other pastoral poetry, as has been the strategy of other critics, but by looking at what is unique in Spenser's re-creation of the pastoral form.
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