Edmund Spenser

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Edmund Spenser (ca. 1552-1599) ranks as the fore most English poet of the 16th century. Famous as the author of the unfinished epic poem "The Faerie" "Queene", he is the poet of an ordered yet passionate Elizabethan world.

Edmund Spenser was a man of his times, and his work reflects the religious and humanistic ideals as well as the intense but critical patriotism of Elizabethan England. His contributions to English literature - in the form of a heightened and enlarged poetic vocabulary, a charming and flexible verse style, and a rich fusing of the philosophic and literary currents of the English Renaissance - entitle him to a rank not far removed from that of William Shakespeare and John Milton.

Spenser was the son of a London tailor, but his family seems to have had its origins in Lancashire. The poet was admitted to the newly founded Merchant Taylors' School about 1561 as a "poor scholar." There his headmaster was the patriotic and scholarly Richard Mulcaster, author of several books on the improvement of the English language. The curriculum at Mulcaster's school included Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; music and drama were stressed; and the English language was also a subject of study - then a novelty.

In 1569 Spenser went to Cambridge, where he entered Pembroke College as a sizar (a student who earns his tuition by acting as a servant to wealthy students). He spent 7 years at the university, gaining his bachelor of arts degree in 1572 and his master of arts degree in 1576. Records of the period reveal that Spenser's health was poor but that he had an excellent reputation as a student. He studied Italian, French, Latin, and Greek; read widely in classical literature and in the poetry of the modern languages; and authored some Latin verse. At Cambridge, Spenser came to know Gabriel Harvey, lecturer in rhetoric and man of letters, who proved to be a faithful and long-term friend and adviser. Among his fellow students were Lancelot Andrewes, later a learned theologian and bishop, and Edward Kirke, a future member of Spenser's poetic circle.

Diplomatic Activities

After completing his studies, Spenser seems to have spent some time in Lancashire, possibly with his relatives. This sojourn in the north increased his familiarity with the northern dialect, which later exerted a considerable influence on the language of The Shepherd's Calendar. Shortly after leaving the university, Spenser also spent time in the service of the powerful Earl of Leicester, regarded as the head of the Puritan faction in the government. Some hints in Spenser's correspondence and in his published works suggest that he may have traveled as an envoy for Leicester to Ireland, Spain, France, and Italy. In any case, in 1578 Spenser was named secretary to the former master of his college, John Young, now bishop of Rochester. Spenser probably composed the major part of The Shepherd's Calendar at Rochester.

By Easter 1579, Spenser was back in London, in daily contact with Gabriel Harvey and Edward Kirke, and much involved in literary discussions, especially those about Harvey's project of introducing classical Latin and Greek nonrhyming meters into English verse. Probably at this time Spenser made the acquaintance of Sir Philip Sidney, the poet and courtier.

The Shepherd's Calendar

By now Spenser had written a considerable quantity of poetry, but he had published nothing. Upon the advice of his friends he decided to make his literary debut with The Shepherd's Calendar (1579), which he dedicated to Sidney. This work, consisting of 12 pastoral eclogues, uses the pastoral conventions as vehicles of allegorical and satirical allusions to contemporary political and religious problems, as well as to the poet's own life and loves. Spenser in this work shows the influence of such classical and foreign models as Virgil, Jacopo Sannazaro, and Clément Marot, but he also acknowledges a considerable debt to Geoffrey Chaucer and to other English sources. The work is especially important for its naturalization in English of a variety of poetic forms - dirges, complaints, paeans - and for its attempt to enrich the English poetic vocabulary through foreign borrowings and through the use of archaic and dialect words.

Allusions and letters from this period of Spenser's life show that he was busy with a variety of literary projects. Spenser was already at work on The Faerie Queene and on a number of the poems eventually collected in his Complaints. Meanwhile, he was also studying law and hoping for a place in diplomacy or civil service. His efforts were rewarded in 1580, when, through the influence of the Earl of Leicester, he was named secretary to Lord Grey, the new lord deputy of Ireland. That same year Spenser accompanied Grey to Dublin.

Ireland was to remain Spenser's home for the rest of his life. Grey was recalled in 1582, but Spenser remained, holding a variety of government posts and participating at first in the cultivated life of Dublin Anglo-Irish society. Increasingly, however, the poet's financial interests and administrative duties took him to Munster (southern Ireland). In 1586 he leased Kilcolman Castle in County Cork, and he lived there after 1588.

The Faerie Queene

For some years Spenser had been working on The Faerie Queene. By 1589 three books were complete. When Sir Walter Raleigh visited the poet in the early autumn of that year, Raleigh was so impressed with this work that he took Spenser with him back to England. In November 1589 they arrived in London; and early in the following year the first three books of Spenser's most famous work were published, with an elaborate dedication to Queen Elizabeth I. Spenser's ambition was to write the great English epic. His plan was to compose 12 books, each concerned with one of the 12 moral virtues as classified by Aristotle. Each of these virtues was to be embodied in a knight. Thus the poem would combine elements of the romance of chivalry, the handbook of manners and morals, and the national epic.

The Faerie Queene can be read on various levels: as an allegory of the eternal struggle between good and evil in every form; as a poetic statement of an ethical system; and as a historical allegory portraying the struggle between the pure Protestant traditions of England and the manifold threats of England's Roman Catholic neighbors. Allusions to contemporary political and religious controversies are numerous. The philosophy underlying Spenser's epic combines three strands. Platonism, which (as seen through the eyes of Renaissance commentators) stressed the harmony between love and beauty on the human and divine levels, is blended with the less imaginative and more concrete Aristotelianism of the scholastic tradition, with its disciplined analysis and careful reflection on the moral life, which Spenser had probably learned in school. These two elements are penetrated by a strong Calvinistic Christianity, stressing man's weakness, his need for a strict moral life, and the total dependence of humanity on the atonement of Christ. Thus the work itself is a fine example of an attempted synthesis between the traditions of Christianity and those of classical antiquity that characterizes all the best productions of the Renaissance.

Spenser's style is distinctively his own: he attempted to create a remote, old-fashioned atmosphere through the use of archaic diction, strange neologisms, and forgotten terms of chivalry. Yet, because of his clear and straightforward syntax, few of his passages are obscure, even to a modern reader. For his verse form, Spenser created a new stanza which has since been often imitated in English literature. It consists of nine lines, eight lines of iambic pentameter concluding with an Alexandrine (iambic hexameter), arranged in the rhyme scheme ababbcbcc. The harmonious and orderly movement of this Spenserian stanza fits the slow, ample, and cumulative pace of the whole work.

The publication of the first three books of The Faerie Queene met with much acclaim. Spenser remained in London for more than a year, enjoying fame and making many friends; but he did not succeed in attaining a sufficiently lucrative post in the home government. Spenser was now by no means a poor man, and his wealth was increased by the substantial annual pension that was the reward for his poem. But in courtly circles he was a decidedly minor figure. In 1591, probably in the spring, Spenser returned to Ireland, famous but disappointed.

The Complaints

Before leaving London, Spenser prepared for publication a collection of minor poems under the title of Complaints. A hint of Spenser's mood at this time might have been expressed in this volume's subtitle: Sundry Small Poems of the World's Vanity. However, most of its contents had been composed years before. The most important of the poems in this volume is "Mother Hubberd's Tale," a satire that had gained notoriety a decade earlier. This poem satirizes Queen Elizabeth's projected marriage to the French Catholic Duke of Alençon - a prospect that had greatly alarmed the Puritan faction at court. The work is important not only because of its political implications but also because of its express and able use of medieval English sources and conventions. Its plot is drawn from William Caxton's translation of the French beast allegory Renard the Fox, and its verse and narrative style betray clear Chaucerian influences.

Also included in the Complaints were revised and enlarged versions of Spenser's youthful translations from Joachim du Bellay and Petrarch; a poem entitled "The Ruins of Time" celebrating the family of the Earl of Leicester and Sir Philip Sidney; and another called "Tears of the Muses," which lamented the poverty and neglect suffered by poets. Somewhat lighter in tone is "Virgil's Gnat," a free translation of the Culex, a humorous ancient poem attributed to Virgil. In this work Spenser tells allegorically of his discomfiture resulting from the adverse political reactions to "Mother Hubberd's Tale." "Muiopotmus; or, The Fate of the Butterfly" was probably an entirely new work written during Spenser's stay in London.

Other Works

Late in 1591, after returning to Ireland, Spenser wrote the greater part of "Colin Clout's Come Home Again," an idealized poetic autobiography dedicated to Raleigh. It ranks as one of Spenser's most charming poems, narrating in the allegorical terms of the then popular pastoral convention the story of his reception in London and his impressions (mostly negative) of court life. Shortly afterward Spenser compiled a collection of poems dedicated to the memory of Sir Philip Sidney. To this collection he contributed the first elegy, "Astrophel." This collection was published together with "Colin Clout's Come Home Again" in 1595.

Meanwhile, Spenser was courting Elizabeth Boyle, an Anglo-Irish woman of a well-connected family. They were married on June 11, 1594. His sonnet sequence "Amoretti" and his "Epithalamion" together form an imaginatively enhanced poetic chronicle of his courtship and marriage. Some of the "Amoretti" sonnets were probably written earlier, but Spenser intended this collection to represent the fluctuations and the emotions of his love for his wife. Written in frequent imitation of such French and Italian sonneteers as Philippe Desportes and Torquato Tasso, Spenser's sonnets, representing one of the most popular poetic forms of his period, are graceful if not great. However, his "Epithalamion" is generally acknowledged to rank among the greatest love poems in English. In this poem a lover's passion blends with a deeply religious sensibility, calling upon both classical myth and medieval legend to create an intricate pattern of allusions and evocations.

Late in 1595 Spenser returned to London, again staying for more than a year. He published during this visit to the capital three more books of The Faerie Queene; the "Prothalamion," written to celebrate the double wedding of two daughters of the Earl of Worcester; and the "Four Hymns," poems that concern his Platonic conceptions of love and beauty. During this stay he seems also to have composed or at least to have revised his View of the Present State of Ireland, a prose tract in which he defended the policies of his earlier patron, Lord Grey, in dealing with rebellious Irish subjects and in which he proposed a program for first subjugating the Irish people and then reforming their government on the model of the English administrative system. Surprisingly, this pamphlet, so in tune with much of governmental opinion, did not receive permission for publication during Spenser's lifetime and was first published in 1633.

Final Period

Spenser seems to have returned to Ireland sometime in 1597 and to have resumed his work on The Faerie Queene. Two more cantos of a succeeding book were published posthumously in 1609, but most of what he wrote in these years has been lost. Spenser was temporarily without political office, but in September 1598 he was named sheriff of Cork. He had hardly taken control of that office before, in October of the same year, the Earl of Tyrone's rebellion, a generalized revolt of the Irish people, broke out in Munster. Spenser's castle was burned, and the poet was forced to flee with his family, which now included four young children.

In December the provincial governor sent Spenser as a messenger to Queen Elizabeth. He arrived in the capital at the end of 1598, much weakened by the hardships of the preceding months. Spenser presented his messages to the Queen, together with a personal statement reiterating his position on the Irish question. Soon after his arrival he became seriously ill, and he died in London on Jan. 16, 1599. Spenser was buried near other poets in Westminster Abbey.

Further Reading

The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition was edited by Edwin Greenlaw and others (9 vols., 1932-1949). A smaller edition of the Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser was edited by J. C. Smith and Ernest de Sélincourt (3 vols., 1909-1910). H. S. V. Jones, A Spenser Handbook (1930), is still useful as a general introduction to the works. A thorough biographical study by Alexander C. Judson, The Life of Edmund Spenser (1945), was published as volume 3 of the Variorum Edition.

Important critical studies include Leicester Bradner, Edmund Spenser and the Faerie Queene (1948); William Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser (1963); and C. S. Lewis, Spenser's Images of Life, edited by Alastair Fowler (1967). Helpful studies of particular aspects of Spenser's work are Edwin Greenlaw, Studies in Spenser's Historical Allegory (1932); C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936); Ruth Mohl, Studies in Spenser, Milton, and the Theory of Monarchy (1949); and E. M. W. Tillyard, The English Epic and Its Background (1954). A work on Spenser's reputation through the centuries is William R. Mueller, ed., Spenser's Critics (1959). Waldo F. McNeir and Foster Provost compiled an Annotated Bibliography of Edmund Spenser, 1937-1960 (1962).

For general background see S. T. Bindoff, Tudor England (1951);Hallet Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (1952); and C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama (1954).

Additional Sources

Rambuss, Richard, Spenser's secret career, Cambridge England;New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Shire, Helena Mennie, A preface to Spenser, London; New York:Longman, 1978.

Spenser and Ireland: an interdisciplinary perspective, Cork: Cork University Press, 1989.

Spenser's life and the subject of biography, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.

Tuckwell, William, Spenser, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1975.

Waller, Gary F. (Gary Fredric), Edmund Spenser: a literary life, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.

Spenser, Edmund (1552-99). Elizabethan poet, mythographer, and colonial administrator. Educated at Merchant Taylors' School and Cambridge, Spenser briefly belonged to the household of the earl of Leicester. His pastoral, The Shepheardes Calender, effectively marks the beginning of the Elizabethan ‘golden age’ of poetry; his masterpiece, The Faerie Queene (Books 1-3, 1590), is the finest example both of the ‘cult of Elizabeth’ and of the project for a ‘reformation’ in English poetics. His last published work, A View of the Present State of Ireland, advocated harsh colonial measures.

Spenser, Edmund (1552–99), English poet. Spenser's magnificent marriage poem, Epithalamion (1594), with its Greek nymphs, Christian angels, and English hobgoblins, foreshadows the multiple mythologies of his unfinished allegorical epic The Faerie Queene (1590–6), where Greek goddesses and satyrs share the forest with giants, dragons, and enchanted castles. Inspired by the epics of Ariosto and Tasso, Spenser planned a multi‐levelled 12‐book structure, its 12 heroes corresponding to the 12 virtues of the perfect Christian gentleman. Linking their interwoven adventures is Arthur, the King to be, and his quest for Gloriana, the Fairy Queen, who represents both true Glory and Queen Elizabeth I.

— Suzanne Rahn

Spenser, Edmund (?1552-1599), poet. Born in London, he studied at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and was briefly in the service of Elizabeth I's favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), marked the arrival of a poet of even greater promise than Philip Sidney, to whom the poem is dedicated. In 1580 he became secretary to Arthur Grey, Lord Wilton, Viceroy of Ireland, and accompanied him to Dublin. Grey was recalled after two years, charged with cruel and dishonourable conduct against the Irish. Spenser never wavered in his support for the methods used to suppress the Desmond Rebellion. After Grey's disgrace he stayed on to become clerk to the council of the Munster plantation and later Sheriff of Cork. Spenser's rank secured him Kilcolman Castle with a large estate near Doneraile in Co. Cork, granted in 1586 and confirmed in 1590. There he lived with his family from 1588 to October 1598, when his home was burnt down by the Earl of Desmond during Hugh O'Neill's rebellion. He died shortly after his return to London and was buried in Westminster Abbey. While living in Ireland Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene (I-III, 1590; IV-VI, 1596), the first great English poem since Chaucer, as well as most of his other works. Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595) expresses his pleasure at coming home to Kilcolman after seeing the first volumes of The Faerie Queene through the press in London. Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595), a sonnet sequence and marriage-poem, celebrates his wedding to Elizabeth Boyle in 1594, and evokes the topography of Cork city and county in one of the masterpieces of English Renaissance poetry. The Faerie Queene comprises a series of allegorical quests by knights who symbolize the Protestant virtues (temperance, etc.) and who encounter magicians, sorceresses, and wicked Saracens intent on diverting them from their duty. Ireland and its conflicts are present in different ways in the poem: in Arthegall, Knight of Justice in Book v, who embodies Lord Grey's attributes; in the pastoral landscapes of VI, derived from the rivers and mountains around Kilcolman; and in the cannibals, also in VI, who are part Irish kerns (soldiers for hire), part Virginian savages. The ‘Mutabilitie Cantos’, which are all that survive of the seventh book, are set on Galtee-more (called Arlo by Spenser, after Aherlow), in the Galtee mountain range. In A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) Spenser associates the most culpable form of degeneracy not with the native Irish but with the Old English, who have adopted their language, laws, and customs. Ireland provided Spenser with wealth and leisure enough to enable him to write the greatest English Renaissance epic.

Spenser, Edmund (1552 or 1553–1599), English poet and author. Born in London, perhaps at East Smithfield, Spenser was educated at the newly founded Merchant Taylors' School and at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. His family may have been related to the Spencers of Althorp. As both politically engaged author and dutiful state servant, he first came to public notice in 1569. In that year, he translated verses by Petrarch (1304–1374) and Joachim Du Bellay (c. 1522–1560) for A Theatre for Worldlings, an English version of a work by the Dutch Calvinist Jan van der Noot (c. 1540–c. 1595)—a key text for the reforming tradition of militant Protestantism to which Spenser belonged—and was paid on 16 October for bearing letters from Tours in France for Sir Henry Norris, English ambassador there, to Queen Elizabeth—the beginning of a long secretarial career.

At Cambridge he began a long-lasting friendship with fellow scholar Gabriel Harvey. He received his B.A. in 1573 and his M.A. in 1576. After a few years in which little is known of his activities or whereabouts, Spenser exploded onto the literary scene in 1579 with The Shepheardes Calender, a pastoral poem in the form of a collection of "eclogues," or conversations among shepherds. Much more than a publication, it was a literary event. The Shepheardes Calender founded the myth of Gloriana, contributing to the cult of Elizabeth at the very moment when Spenser, frustrated in his efforts to secure preference at court, was seeking his fortune abroad. Despite its panegyric to the queen in the April Eclogue, it contains a covert critique of church and state. Like his later work, it contests the very authority to which it apparently commends itself.

Published anonymously, but carefully timed to coincide with correspondence with Harvey containing clues to its authorship, The Shepheardes Calender came complete with the kind of editorial apparatus associated with classical texts by canonical authors, yet was illustrated with woodcuts, and contained dialogue written in the language of ordinary country folk. This mix of playfulness and purposefulness, with its inventive and often subversive borrowing from high and low culture, is characteristically Spenserian. The Shepheardes Calender was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, earning Spenser a mention in Sidney's Apology for Poetry (1595).

In 1580 Spenser became secretary to the new lord deputy of Ireland, Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton. Ireland remained Spenser's home until his death. Having presented himself as the most promising poet of his generation with The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser failed to publish for a decade, busy both with the writing of his epic poem, The Faerie Queene, and with his role as secretary. From 1588, he occupied an estate of three thousand acres at Kilcolman, County Cork, one of many parcels of land seized from the late earl of Desmond as part of a government plan to settle lands in Munster with English tenants. This earned him the title of gentleman and provided a base from which to pursue his literary projects. He associated with Sir Walter Raleigh (1554–1618), who was a neighbor.

In September 1598 Spenser was appointed sheriff of Cork. Weeks later, Kilcolman was razed as part of a popular uprising. Spenser fled to Cork City, and from there to London, carrying a letter from the provincial president, Sir Thomas Norris, to the Privy Council, outlining the plight of the settlers. This last commission came thirty years after the performance of a similar duty for Norris's father. Spenser died in London on 13 January 1599.

The Faerie Queen

The first three books of The Faerie Queene appeared in 1590. A heady brew of Italianate romance, classical epic, and indigenous idioms inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, John Lydgate, and John Skelton, its verbal density and formal difficulty marked a radical break with English poetic form, impacting later developments in poetry. Its sheer ambition coupled with an intimate attachment to landscape inspired poets from John Milton, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope, to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Seamus Heaney. Its greatest innovation was the Spenserian stanza, a nine-line fusion of French "rhyme royal" and Italian "ottava rima," eight pentameters ending on an alexandrine, with a rhyme scheme of ababbcbcc. The second part of The Faerie Queene, books 4–6, appeared in 1596. Critics detect a darkening of purpose in the later books, as the allegory becomes more historical and political, especially in book 5, "The Legend of Justice." The "darke conceit" of The Faerie Queene shadows—and shares in—the dark doings of the English in Ireland, from martial law to massacres. Cowardice was not part of Spenser's makeup. Those who condemn his role in the government's violent suppression of resistance to colonization in Ireland respect a writer who had the courage of his convictions.

Spenser's work retained its critical edge right to the end, whether published in his own lifetime or in posthumous parting shots, from the anticourtly sentiments of The Shepheardes Calender and Colin Clout's Come Home Againe (1595) to the sharp criticisms of government that litter the prose dialogue A View of the State of Ireland (1596; published 1633), and, in The Faerie Queene itself, from the provocative account of the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), in canto 9 of book 5—which so enraged her son, James VI (ruled 1567–1625), that he asked for the poem to be destroyed and the poet punished—to the sniping from the margins in the "Mutabilitie Cantoes" that form a fragment of book 7 (unpublished until 1609).

Spenser lacked the means—perhaps even the muse—to write in England the national epic he was able to forge freely in Ireland. Born and buried in England, his career and corpus were made in Ireland. Spenser's colonial status both empowered and impaled him. His Irish experiences continue to engage and enrage critics in equal measure. For some, Spenser's astonishingly varied and vibrant literary output remains unbound by any context, historical or political. For others, the poetry, like the prose, is tainted by the world of violence from which it sprang. But where Ireland was once associated with the burden of history in Spenser studies, it has recently opened up his work to new readerships and new readings. Given his location between two cultures, as an imperial servant who became increasingly attached to his adopted country, it is no surprise that Spenser has received attention from postcolonial critics. His fusion of forms has attracted others who see him as an early postmodernist. One thing is clear: studying Spenser is, like his writing itself, an endless work.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Spenser, Edmund. The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser. Edited by J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt. London, 1912. Reprinted 1985.

——. A View of the State of Ireland (1633): From the First Printed Edition. Edited by Andrew Hatfield and Willy Maley. Oxford, 1997.

——. The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition. Edited by E. A. Greenlaw, et al. 11 vols. Baltimore, 1932–1949.

Secondary Sources

Burrow, Colin. Edmund Spenser. Plymouth, U.K., 1996.

Hadfield, Andrew. Spenser's Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Savage Soyl. Oxford, 1997.

Hamilton, A. C., ed. The Spenser Encyclopedia. Toronto, 1990.

Maley, Willy. A Spenser Chronology. New York, 1994.

Shire, Helena. A Preface to Spenser. London, 1978.

—WILLY MALEY

Quotes:

"It is the mind that maketh good or ill, that maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor."

"Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind."

"But Justice, though her dome [doom] she doe prolong,Yet at the last she will her owne cause right."

Edmund Spenser
Born	c.1552 London, England
Died	13 January 1599 (aged 46–47) London, England
Occupation	Poet
Influences Geoffrey Chaucer
Influenced William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Shakespeare, William Butler Yeats
Signature

Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 – 13 January 1599) was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem celebrating, through fantastical allegory, the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognized as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy.

Contents 1 Life 2 Structure of the Spenserian stanza and sonnet 3 Without A Rhyme or Reason 4 List of works 5 References 6 Sources 7 External links

Life

Edmund Spenser was born in London around 1552. As a young boy, he was educated in London at the Merchant Taylors' School and matriculated as a sizar at Pembroke College, Cambridge.^[1][2]

In July 1580 Spenser went to Ireland, in the service of the newly appointed lord deputy, Arthur Lord Grey de Wilton. Then he served with the English forces during the Second Desmond Rebellion. After the defeat of the rebels he was awarded lands in County Cork that had been confiscated in the Munster Plantation during the Elizabethan reconquest of Ireland. Among his acquaintances in the area was Walter Raleigh, a fellow colonist.

Through his poetry Spenser hoped to secure a place at court, which he visited in Raleigh's company to deliver his most famous work, the Faerie Queene. However, he boldly antagonized the queen's principal secretary, Lord Burghley, and all he received in recognition of his work was a pension in 1591. When it was proposed that he receive payment of 100 pounds for his epic poem, Burghley remarked, "What, all this for a song!"

Portrait of Edmund Spenser, artist unknown

In the early 1590s, Spenser wrote a prose pamphlet titled, A View of the Present State of Ireland. This piece remained in manuscript until its publication and print in the mid-seventeenth century. It is probable that it was kept out of print during the author's lifetime because of its inflammatory content. The pamphlet argued that Ireland would never be totally 'pacified' by the English until its indigenous language and customs had been destroyed, if necessary by violence. Spenser recommended scorched earth tactics, such as he had seen used in the Desmond Rebellions, to create famine. Although it has been highly regarded as a polemical piece of prose and valued as a historical source on 16th century Ireland, the View is seen today as genocidal in intent. Spenser did express some praise for the Gaelic poetic tradition, but also used much tendentious and bogus analysis to demonstrate that the Irish were descended from barbarian Scythian stock.

Later on, during the Nine Years War in 1598, Spenser was driven from his home by Irish rebels. His castle at Kilcolman, near Doneraile in North Cork was burned, and it is thought one of his infant children died in the blaze - though local legend has it that his wife also died. He possessed a second holding to the south, at Rennie, on a rock overlooking the river Blackwater in North Cork. The ruins of it are still visible today. A short distance away grew a tree, locally known as "Spenser's Oak" until it was destroyed in a lightning strike in the 1960s. Local legend has it that he penned some or all of The Faerie Queene under this tree. Queen Victoria is said to have visited the tree while staying in nearby Convamore House during her state visit to Ireland. In the following year Spenser traveled to London, where he died in distressed circumstances, aged forty-six. It was arranged for his coffin to be carried by other poets, upon which they threw many pens and pieces of poetry into his grave with many tears.

Spenser was admired by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron and Alfred Lord Tennyson,^{[citation needed]} among others. The language of his poetry is purposely archaic, reminiscent of earlier works such as The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, whom Spenser greatly admired.

Spenser's Epithalamion is the most admired of its type in the English language. It was written for his wedding to his young bride, Elizabeth Boyle. The poem consists of 365 long lines, corresponding to the days of the year; 68 short lines, representing the sum of the 52 weeks, 12 months, and 4 seasons of the annual cycle; and 24 stanzas, corresponding to the diurnal and sidereal hours.

Structure of the Spenserian stanza and sonnet

Spenser used a distinctive verse form, called the Spenserian stanza, in several works, including The Faerie Queene. The stanza's main meter is iambic pentameter with a final line in iambic hexameter (having six feet or stresses, known as an Alexandrine), and the rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc.

The Spenserian Sonnet is based on a fusion of elements of both the Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet. It is similar to the Shakespearan sonnet in the sense that its set up is based more on the 3 quatrains and a couplet,a system set up by Shakespeare; however it is more like the Petrarchan tradition in the fact that the conclusion follows from the argument or issue set up in the earlier quatrains. There is also a great use of the parody of the blason and the idealization or praise of the mistress, a literary device used by many poets. It is a way to look at a woman through the appraisal of her features in comparison to other things. In this description, the mistress's body is described part by part, i.e., much more of a scientific way of seeing one. As William Johnson states in his article "Gender Fashioning and Dynamics of Mutuality in Spenser's Amoretti," the poet-love in the scenes of Spenser's sonnets in Amoretti, is able to see his lover in an objectified manner by moving her to another, or more clearly, an item. The purpose of Spenser doing this is to bring the woman from the "transcendental ideal" to a woman in everyday life. "Through his use of metonymy and metaphor, by describing the lady not as a whole being but as bodily parts, by alluding to centuries of topoi which remove her in time as well as space, the poet transforms the woman into a text, the living 'other' into an inanimate object" (503). The opposite of this also occurs in The Faerie Queen. The counter-blason, or the opposition of appraisal, is used to describe Duessa. She is not objectified, but instead all of her flaws are highlighted.

Without A Rhyme or Reason

Spenser is also the man believed to have crafted the phrase "without reason or a rhyme". He was promised payment from the Queen of one hundred pounds, a so called, "reason for the rhyme". The Lord High Treasurer William Cecil, however, considered the sum too much. After a long while without receiving his payment, he sent her this quatrain:

I was promis'd on a time,
To have a reason for my rhyme:
But from that time unto this season,
I had neither rhyme or reason.

She immediately ordered Cecil to send Spenser his due sum.

List of works

Publication years are linked to their corresponding "[year] in poetry" articles:

• Iambicum Trimetrum
• 1569: Jan van der Noot's A theatre for Worldlings, including poems translated into English by Spenser from French sources, published by Henry Bynneman in London^[3]
• 1579: The Shepheardes Calender, published under the pseudonym "Immerito"^[4] (entered into the Stationers' Register in December^[3])
• 1590: The Faerie Queene, Books 1–3, published in London (Books 4–6 1596, final books 1609)^[3]

1591:

• Complaints Containing sundrie small Poemes of the Worlds Vanitie (entered into the Stationer's Register in 1590^[3]), includes:
  • The Ruines of Time
  • The Teares of the Muses
  • Virgil's Gnat
  • Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds Tale
  • Ruines of Rome: by Bellay
  • Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterflie
  • Visions of the worlds vanitie
  • The Visions of Bellay
  • The Visions of Petrarch

1592:

• Axiochus, a translation of a pseudo-Platonic dialogue from the original Ancient Greek; published by Cuthbert Burbie; attributed to "Edw: Spenser"^[3] but the attribution is uncertain^[5]
• Daphnaïda. An Elegy upon the death of the noble and vertuous Douglas Howard, Daughter and heire of Henry Lord Howard, Viscount Byndon, and wife of Arthure Gorges Esquier (published in London in January, according to one source^[3]; another source gives 1591 as the year^[4])

1595:

• Amoretti and Epithalamion, containing:
  • Amoretti^[3]
  • Epithalamion^[3]
• Astrophel. A Pastoral Elegie upon the death of the most Noble and valorous Knight, Sir Philip Sidney
• Colin Clouts Come home againe

1596:

• Fowre Hymnes dedicated from the court at Greenwich;^[3] published with the second edition of Daphnaida^[4]
• Prothalamion^[3]
• The Faerie Queene, Books 4–6 (Books 1–3 1590)^[3]

Posthumous:

• 1609: Two Cantos of Mutabilitie published together with a reprint of The Fairie Queene^[6]
• 1611: First folio edition of Spenser's collected works^[6]
• 1633: A vewe of the present state of Irelande a prose treatise on the reformation of Ireland,^[7] first published in James Ware's Ancient Irish Chronicles (Spenser's work was entered into the Stationer's Register in 1598 and circulated in manuscript but not published until it was included in this work of Ware's)^[6]

References

1. ^ Spenser, Edmund in Venn, J. & J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922–1958.
2. ^ The Edmund Spenser Home Page: Biography
3. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k} Web page titled "Edmund Spenser Home Page/Biography", "Chronology" section (at bottom of Chronology, Web page states: "Source: adapted from Willy Maley, A Spenser Chronology."), at the website of the University of Cambridge Faculty of English website, retrieved September 24, 2009
4. ^ ^{a b c} Cox, Michael, editor, The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature, Oxford University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-19-860634-6
5. ^ Hadfield, Andrew, The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, "Chronology", Cambridge University Press, 2001, ISBN 0521641993, p xix, retrieved via Google Books, September 24, 2009
6. ^ ^{a b c} Hadfield, Andrew, The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, "Chronology", Cambridge University Press, 2001, ISBN 0521641993, p xx, retrieved via Google Books, September 24, 2009
7. ^ Web page titled "Edmund Spenser Home Page/Biography", at the website of the University of Cambridge Faculty of English website, retrieved September 24, 2009

Sources

• Rust, Jennifer. "Spenser's The Faerie Queen." Saint Louis University, St. Louis. 10 October 2007.
• Johnson, William. "The struggle between good and evil in the first book of "The Faerie Queene". English Studies, Vol. 74, No. 6. (December 1993) p. 507-519.

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Edmund Spenser

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Edmund Spenser

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Edmund Spenser

• Works by Edmund Spenser at Project Gutenberg
• Edmund Spenser at Luminarium.org
• The Edmund Spenser Home Page at the Cambridge University
• A View of the Present State of Ireland
• Project Gutenberg edition of Biography of Edmund Spenser by John W. Hales
• Poetry Archive: 154 poems of Edmund Spenser
• The Spenser Encyclopedia by A. C. Hamilton in Google Books Preview

Preceded by: John Skelton

English Poet Laureate

Succeeded by: Samuel Daniel

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