Edmund Spenser

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Edmund Spenser

Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 - 13 January, 1599) was an English poet of the early Renaissance who, along with his close contemporary William Shakespeare, brought about what would be a revolution in English literature. Spenser, like Shakespeare, represents a bridge between the medieval and early modern periods in English literary history. He drew on a wide range of sources, most notably Chaucer and the continental poets like Petrarch and Boccaccio, and merged them with a uniquely English sensibility. In addition to this, Spenser is perhaps the most important poet, in terms of technique, in England's history. Although Sir Thomas Wyatt is generally credited with writing the first sonnet in English, Spenser is almost unanimously seen as being the first poet to truly demonstrate the form's full potential. Spenser is likewise credited with introducing a number of poetic techniques which had first been invented one or two centuries prior on the Continent to a wider English audience, such as Petrarch's canzone and Arnaut Daniel's sestina.

Spenser's poetry, likewise, is more Romantic—in the sense that it is looking towards a nostalgic past rather than towards an uncertain future—than that of many of his contemporaries. Spenser was a close friend and an associate of the poets Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh, both of whom, in addition to being poets, were wild, adventuresome, Renaissance men. His other close contemporaries include Shakespeare and Marlowe, both of whom, in one way or another, were writing in response to the massive change in thought and outlook that would become the Renaissance. Spenser does not quite fit into this category. His most important poem—the massive epic The Faerie Queene—is intentionally archaic, and was conceived by Spenser as a rejuvenation of the medieval code of chivalry and morality. He was also staunchly anti-Protestant and antiCatholic, and a number of his shorter poems were written as polemics, in hopes of preventing the unity of the Anglican Church from being torn apart by the dissent of an increasingly dissatisfied people. In all of these respects, it is often difficult for a reader today to open Spenser's works and not be put-off by his anachronisms.

However, it is important to recall the unique point in time in which Spenser lived. He did not live, like most of his contemporaries, long enough to see the full ramifications of the Renaissance played out in the radical developments that would occur in science and philosophy during the course of the 17th century. Moreover, he was a man of low birth who spent most of his life away from London, in the intellectual backwaters of England. His reading, and his interests, primarily consisted of more ancient texts than most of the writers around him, and viewed in this way Spenser is a vital link between the earlier centuries of Middle English in the Middle Ages, and what would become the early modern era of English literature. Spenser absorbed all of the major writers of the previous two hundred years, including Chaucer, and Petrarch, and the Troubadours, and presented the things he found there in such a way to his own times that he would immediately popular and apprehensible, and hence, one of the major figures (some would argue the major figure, even greater than Shakespeare) of English literature after the 16th century.

Life

Spenser was born circa 1552, and educated in London at the Merchant Taylors' School. He went to Ireland in the 1570s, during the Elizabethan reconquest of the country, to acquire land and wealth there.

From 1579 to 1580, he served with the English forces during the second of the Desmond Rebellions, and afterwards was awarded lands in Cork that had been confiscated from the rebels in the Munster Plantation. Amongst his acquaintances in the area was Sir Walter Raleigh who, like Spenser, had been granted land in Munster.

Edmund Spenser, through his poetry hoped to achieve a secure place in court but (partly as a result of foolishly antagonising Lord Burghley) all he received in recognition for his work was a pension in 1591. For most of his life he lived in Ireland, bitter toward not only the English court but to his neighbors, the Irish, whose culture Spenser disliked.

In the early 1590s he wrote a prose pamphlet titled, A View on the Present State of Ireland. This piece has become quite famous since it was published in the mid seventeenth century, although it was not published in Spenser's lifetime, being thought too inflammatory. The pamphlet argued Ireland would never be totally 'pacified' until its indigenous language and customs had been destroyed, if necessary by violence.

He recommended using 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. He also siphoned Ireland's Celtic tradition for poetic source material. Spenser was driven from his home by Irish rebels during the Nine Years War in 1598. He died in 1599, aged approximately 46.

Poetry

The first poem to earn Spenser notability was a collection of eclogues called The Shepheardes Calendar, written from the point of view of various shepherds throughout the months of the year. The poem is an allegory symbolizing the state of humanity. The diversity of forms and meters, ranging from accentual-syllabic to purely accentual, and including such departures as the sestina in "August," gave Spenser's contemporaries a clue to the range of his powers and won him praise in his day.

The Faerie Queene is his major contribution to English poetry. The poem is a long, dense allegory, in the epic]] form, of Christian virtues, tied into England's mythology of King Arthur.

Spenser intended to complete twelve books of the poem, but managed only six before his death. The work remains the longest epic poem in the English language, and has inspired writers from John Milton and John Keats through James Joyce and Ezra Pound. He devised a verse form for The Faerie Queene that has come to be known as the "Spenserian stanza," and which has since been applied in poetry by the likes of William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

The language of his poetry is purposely archaic. It reminds readers of earlier works 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, and it represents the first widely popular sonnet sequence written in the English language. The sequence would go on to inspire Shakespeare's famous sequence of sonnets several years later.

Poetic Extracts

Faerie Queene. Book v. Proem. St. 3.

Let none then blame me, if in discipline

Of vertue and of civill uses lore,

I doe not forme them to the common line

Of present dayes, which are corrupted sore,

But to the antique use which was of yore,

When good was onely for it selfe desyred,

And all men sought their owne, and none no more;

When Justice was not for most meed out-hyred,

But simple Truth did rayne, and was of all admyred.

Faerie Queene. Book iii. Canto xi. St. 54.

And as she lookt about, she did behold,

How over that same dore was likewise writ,

Be bold, be bold, and every where be bold,

That much she muz'd, yet could not construe it

By any ridling skill, or commune wit.

At last she spyde at that roomes upper end,

Another yron dore, on which was writ,

Be not too bold; whereto though she did bend

Her earnest mind, yet wist not what it might intend.

Trivia

• Blatant Beast was a phrase Spenser coined for the ignorant, slanderous, clamour of the mob. However, the Blatant Beast from The Faerie Queene is clearly shown to indicate slander in general, and a large part of the final complete book (Book VI, although the Blatant Beast first appears towards the end of Book V) is showing how thoroughly the Blatant Beast ravages the world, first spreading from the Court (not the villages or slums) and causing havoc everywhere it goes until it even penetrates into the monasteries and causes great distress there. Only Calidore, the most courteous of knights, was able to tame, chain, and imprison the Blatant Beast, which eventually would break free and, as The Faerie Queene concludes by saying, still ravages the world today since only two Arthurian knights ever even came close to doing what Calidore did and even The Faerie Queene, the text asserts, shall become a target for the Blatant Beast.

External links

• The Edmund Spenser Home Page
• Project Gutenberg edition of Biography of Edmund Spenser by John W. Hales
• Poetry Archive: 154 poems of Edmund Spenser

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