Balachandra Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished, English Poetics from Spenser to Pound

Abstract

The Renaissance writer was often challenged by another writer’s incomplete work. The story of Orlando in love passed from Boiardo to Ariosto. Spenser, not taking Chaucer’s point, continued both of the Canterbury Tales that were deliberately incomplete, and left his own challenge to Ralph Knevett, who did a continuation of the over-assimilative Faerie Queene. Milton regretted, and his father’s acquaintance John Lane attended to, the imagined incompleteness of The Squire’s Tale. Original and major as Chapman, or irredeemably minor as Petowe, the finishing school was large, workers of artistic piety in a short-lived age. The “magnificent knight” who finished Martorell’s Tirant to Blanc modestly hopes the only just literary critic (in Hopkin’s phrase) will reward his labours with the glory of Paradise.