| Here he allegorizes good and evil, much more in the manner of Spenser or Goethe than that of his American literary contemporaries Melville or Poe. |
| Parker's Spenser is the best private eye in American detective fiction and has been for at least the past 20 years. |
| This order of rimes reminds us of that in the Spenserian stanza, and must have been devised by Spenser at about the same time. |
| By contrast, this character is a Latino version of Hawk, the darkly menacing, monosyllabic backup man he created for his Spenser detective series. |
| The cumulative effect of these descent scenes is to establish Spenser as the poet of initiations. |
| Unlike the minstrel who sings freely, with his audience joining in, Spenser now has to deal with the expectations of his audience. |
