This study explores ‘the new Poet's’ novelty: how his achievement is the result of his predicament. I argue that Spenser's work develops from traditional poetics to newer ideas of writing that reflect the uncertainties of a society in the process of rapid change. In my view, the Complaints reveal the tensions between literary tradition and novelty which eventually produce an innovative conception of poetry. Spenser's achievement in Complaints is to register his critical concern with poetry in such a way as to let the reader appreciate the conceptual change it was undergoing.

I begin with Virgils Gnat because it is probably the earliest of the Complaints (with the exception of the Visions), and because of the tensions it exhibits in the purpose and process of its translation of the pseudo-Virgilian Culex. Spenser's purpose is avowedly more than just to make an accurate translation. In the Dedicatory sonnet, he appropriates Culex's primary allegory, claiming that ‘this Gnatts complaint’ is a ‘clowdie’ representation of his ‘case’ to the Earl of Leicester. But the sonnet is caught between Spenser's desire to disclose the general idea that his poem is a personal allegory, and his concern to withhold any particularized key to the meaning of that allegory. There is a tension in Virgils Gnat's purpose between Spenser's political caution and his desire to proclaim his innocence. The sonnet also displays Spenser's initial understanding of traditional allegorical poetics, and his expectation that his reader will share such hermeneutic strategies. This traditional aesthetic is in turn in tension with the poem's innovatory translation of Latin hexameters in ottava rima stanzas.

In the process of translation, Spenser is involved in other agendas which are not raised in the Dedicatory sonnet. Though Culex's allegorical defence of the court poet was directly congruent with Spenser's experience and ambitions in the late 1570s and early 1580s, its affirmation of the Roman state as the embodiment of civilization through a pagan theology is in direct conflict with the world view of an Elizabethan Protestant. This conflict leads to Spenser's partial medievalizing of the gnat's complaint. Spenser's manipulation of the complaint mode is already critical to his transformation of traditional poetry.

Culex in the Sixteenth Century

Despite modern scholars’ rejection of its authenticity, during the Renaissance Culex was viewed as Virgil's first poem.