Spenser's Images of Life

A study of Spenser's Faerie Queene, edited by Alastair Fowler and published by Cambridge University Press in 1967. Lewis left notes for a course of lectures on the poem that he had given at Cambridge; Fowler, his former pupil, wrote them up into a short book. It reads the poem through its images and pageants, the processions, houses, figures and symbols in which Spenser presents the virtues and vices, and argues that their meaning lies in their imaginative quality rather than in a hidden code. The book continues the account of Spenser in The Allegory of Love (1936) and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954).