As the only eclogue in The Shepheardes Calender formally on ‘the state of Poete’ (97), October is striking as one of the most complex (cf. Lane 1993: 158). The pastoral dialogue here is indeed challenging, as two shepherds from previous eclogues, the younger Cuddie (Februarie, August), and the older Piers (Maye), debate the highest stakes for poetry in 1570s England: the ‘place’ of ‘pierlesse Poesye’ both in ‘Princes pallace’ (79-80) and in ‘Heaven’ (54, 60, and 84).

As with June, the difficulty results from failed, or obscure, narrative transitions among the topics that the shepherds discuss. These topics may be divided into four main parts. 1) In lines 1-36, Cuddie complains that he has written poetry to delight the youth but failed to secure the material gain required to continue writing, while Piers reminds him that the poet should strive for ‘glory’ rather than ‘gayne’ (20): that Cuddie should use poetic delight for ethical education, on the model of Orpheus’s rescue of his wife Eurydice from Hades—a proposal that Cuddie rejects: ‘But who rewards him ere the more for thy’ (33). 2) In lines 37-78, Piers suggests that if Cuddie really wants to secure ‘reward’ he should write the kinds of poetry that meet the needs of powerful patrons: he should turn from pastoral to epic but also (as June has intimated) he should include love lyric as a mediating form. This advice reminds Cuddie of the ‘Romish Tityrus’ (55), Virgil, who secured patronage from Maecenas to pursue a career of pastoral, georgic, and epic in service of Augustan Rome—a model, Cuddie adds, that no longer applies in England, where patronage, heroism, and poetic achievement are absent. 3) In lines 79-97, Piers thus raises the central question about the place of poetry at court, and suggests that Cuddie may need to write poetry that ‘flye[s] backe to heaven apace’ (84). This final advice prompts Cuddie to recall Colin Clout’s potential to complete such a ‘famous flight’ (88), if Colin’s love for Rosalind did not ground him. Cuddie’s recollection, nonetheless, leads Piers to identify Colin as a model for such a glorious ascent. 4) In lines 98-120, Cuddie then rejects the serene possibility of high flight on the wings of love—‘All otherwise the state of Poet stands’ (97)—and outlines a more violent model for poetic loftiness, a Horatian reliance on wine to write ‘stage’ tragedy (112), even though Cuddie concludes by admitting his own inability to do so. At the end, Piers offers Cuddie consolation by promising to award him a ‘Kidde’ (120).

In these complex modulations, Spenser represents three basic career models available to the patron-seeking poet in mid-Elizabethan England: amateur; professional; laureate (Helgerson 1983). Cuddie’s youthful poetic model of the poet delighting his audience with pleasant ditties corresponds to an amateur model, because he sees poetry as merely a pastime. Cuddie’s dramatic model, in which tragedy allows the poet to ‘compasse weightye prise’ (103), corresponds to the professional, who writes primarily to make a living. And Cuddie’s reference to Virgil’s career corresponds to the laureate model, in which the poet serves the nation in the context of eternity: ‘So as the Heavens did quake his verse to here’ (60). Yet Piers’ insertion of love poetry into the laureate model (presumably as a substitute for georgic, which did not yet exist in England [A. Fowler 1982: 240]) is innovative, showing Spenser finding a ‘place’ for the Petrarchan lyric in the career of the aspiring poet: ‘Of love and lustihead tho mayst thou sing, . . . / So mought our Cuddies name to Heaven sownde’ (50, 54). Moreover, Piers’ suggestion that the poet should return to heaven when he fails to find a place in ‘Princes pallace’ may indicate that Spenser himself envisions an Augustinian-based hymn as an endpoint for the poet’s career. Thus the dialogue dilates on the most influential classical model of a literary career available to English poets and shows Spenser adapting Virgil in light of both an Augustinian Christianity and Petrarchism. Yet the shepherds’ dialogic pattern of proposal and rejection leaves the state of poet open-ended.

Accordingly, October ‘explores the stark contrast’ between ‘the material needs of the poet’ and ‘the sublime aspirations of poetry’ (McCabe 1999: 559). For all the shepherds’ worldly discussion of practicality, career, and money, they recurrently turn to a heighted discourse of poetic sublimity—a discourse that also characterizes the glossarial language of E.K. Spenser here taps into the late sixteenth-century experimentation with four principal forms of ‘aesthetic extremes’: ‘wonder’, ‘Christian ecstasy’, Neoplatonic ‘furor’, and the ‘sublime’ (Sedley 2005: 9, 157n17). Longinus, whose On Sublimity saw seven continental editions published before 1579 (Weinberg 1950), including two copies of the Portus edition in a 1578 Cambridge bookshop (Leedham-Green, personal communication), links sublimity with all three aesthetic extremes, but shows the sublime to be distinctive for its commitment to confusion, ignorance, and breakdown: ‘Sublimity tears everything up like a whirlwind’ (1.4, in Russell and Winterbottom 1972: 144). Thus this heightened poetics proceeds through metaphors of the whirlwind but also of earth-quaking lightning; it locates poetic excellence in a lofty style of poetry; it valorizes the emotions of rapture and rage, beyond reason, intoxicated; and it makes both poet and audience gods, not simply citizens (see Introduction). October’s discourse recurrently expresses the sublime, which Longinus finds in Plato but which cannot be equated with Platonism (or Neoplatonism) because of its willingness to enter into the dangerous space of irrationality: e.g., in the dialogue, such language as ‘soule of sence bereave . . . quake his verse to here . . . climbe so hie . . . the ryme should rage . . . troublous tydes’; and, in E.K.’s gloss, ‘make men immortall . . . astonied and as it were ravished . . . ravished with Poeticall furie’. E.K.’s gloss on Cuddie’s emblem summarizes the sublime succinctly, from Longinus to Kant to Lyotard: ‘Poetry is a divine instinct and unnatural rage passing the reache of comen reason’.

Spenser’s formal source-texts for October are the two cited by E.K., Theocritus’ Idylls 16, a pastoral complaint about the niggardliness of the tyrant Ptolemy; and Mantuan’s Eclogues 5, a dialogue about the difficulty of writing poetry in an age devoid of patrons, heroes, and successful poets. Specifically, Spenser may depend on Barclay’s adaptation of Mantuan’s eclogue, published in 1570 in Barclay’s posthumous Certain Eclogues (although written earlier in the sixteenth century), and Turbervile’s translation of Mantuan in 1567 (cf. Hoffman 1977: 11-29). Yet the passages on Virgil’s career, Neoplatonic love, Horatian wine, and Senecan tragedy (‘lavish cups and thriftie bittes of meate’ [105]) shows Spenser suturing pastoral to a wide ‘webbe’ (102) of literary and philosophical intertexts.

Within such a web, where is the ‘place’ of Edmund Spenser? Is October a ‘personal manifesto, a declaration of his own aims’ (Renwick, Var 7: 374), a ‘climactic hymn to poetry’ (King 1986: 397), and the ‘articulation of . . . a theory . . . [that] combines neoplatonism and traditional Horatianism along with a Christian emphasis on divine inspiration’ (Waller 1993: 44)—in all of which the author can be seen to identify with Piers and with E.K? Or does the author side more with Cuddie and his fraught social embeddedness, disparaging Piers’ Neoplatonic transcendence as escapist (Lane 1993: 158-67), since the Spenserian gold standard surely lies in a ‘poetry of virtuous action-in-the-world’ (Montrose 1979: 49)? Alternatively, does Spenser critique both Piers and Cuddie, who share a naïve ‘golden-age sensibility’: ‘Cuddie withdraws in defeat while Piers converts to a gesture of escape’ (Berger 1988: 314)? Finally, then, does Spenser present the poet as transcendent or contingent, writing for this world or the next, promoting citizenship or godhood? October’s potency may lie in its complex use of pastoral dialogue to represent this very question.

A version of the question arises in the woodcut, indicating once again how the complexity of the poet either baffled the eye of the artisan or liberated it. Standing in the foreground closest to the center is a figure marked as a wise and successful older poet: he is bearded, wears a garland, and holds out a panpipe, his sheep at his feet. To his right is a younger shepherd with one arm reaching out and the other holding a crook, his sheep also near him. Behind the younger shepherd, an indistinct hill looms on the horizon, a small tree at its base, while behind the older shepherd are two scenes: in the first, a figure walks up the steps of an imposing edifice that is part temple and part palace, and is overlooked by a leafy tree; and in the second, to the left, another figure walks toward a group of people standing beside the building. Most directly, ‘The woodcut depicts the Virgilian paradigm by showing an aged Piers as Virgil crowned with laurel and offering Cuddie the pastoral oaten reeds. On a hill behind Piers-Virgil is an empty classical temple and an Italianate palace (cf. “Princes palace,” 80 and 81). Several figures admire the temple, but one moves resolutely toward it and another climbs its steps. . . . Cuddie rejects Piers’s offer by pointing out the figure approaching the temple. . . . Obviously, the figure ascending to the temple of fame is Colin’ (Cain in Oram 1989: 167-8; see Luborsky 1981: 36-9; Brooks-Davies 1995: 158). Yet the shepherd wearing the laurel garland may also be Cuddie, since E.K. identifies him as ‘the perfecte paterne of a Poete’ (Gen Arg), one who has ‘turned his back on the halls of power. . . , [and who] retains the crown of laurels, the sign of public status and influence’ (Lane 1993: 163, 166, 228n37). Irrespective of which figure is which, it remains difficult to determine whether the laurel poet supports or rejects a public poetry of epic in favor of a private poetry of pastoral: is the laurel poet pointing the way to the Virgilian model or turning away from it (cf. McCabe 1999: 559)?

As if to highlight the complexities of both the woodcut and the dialogue, October’s verse form remains paradoxically clear and simple. Cuddie and Piers, for all their differences, share a six-line stanza adapted from Januarye, now rhyming abbaba.

The achievement of October has long rivaled that other pinnacle of Spenserian pastoral authorship, November, which E.K. finds ‘farre passing . . . all other the Eglogues of this booke’ (Nov Arg). Yet in his October gloss, E.K. says that the ‘style’ in this tenth eclogue is ‘more loftye then the rest’ (for agreements, see Craik, Var 7: 366; Herford, Var 7: 368; Cory, Var 7: 369). Rather than solve the problem of the poet’s ‘place’ in the world, October presents a verse prism that refracts it. In the end, Spenser represents, rather than reveals, the sublime ‘state’ of poetic truth in 1570s England.