Read complete books and articles on: Edmund Spenser

Spenser, Edmund - 1552?–1599, English poet, b. London. He was the friend of men eminent in literature and at court, including Gabriel Harvey, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Robert Sidney, earl of Leicester. After serving as secretary to the Bishop of Rochester, Spenser was appointed in 1580 secretary to Lord Grey, lord deputy of Ireland. Afterward Spenser lived in Ireland, holding minor civil offices and receiving the lands and castle of Kilcolman, Co. Cork. In 1589, under Raleigh's sponsorship, Spenser went to London, where he apparently sought court preferment and publication of the first three books of The Faerie Queene. After the Tyrone rebellion of 1598, in which Kilcolman Castle was burned, he returned to London, where he died in 1599. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. Recognized by his contemporaries as the foremost poet of his time, Spenser was not only a master of meter and language but a profound moral poet as well. Patterning his literary career after that of Vergil, Spenser first published 12 pastoral eclogues of The Shepheardes Calender (1579), which treat the shepherd as rustic priest and poet. His Complaints and Daphnaida, the latter an elegy on Douglas Howard, both appeared in 1591. In 1595 Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, a pastoral allegory dealing with Spenser's first London journey and the vices inherent in court life, and Astrophel, an elegy on Sir Philip Sidney, were published. In the same year Amoretti, Spenser's sonnet sequence commemorating his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle, and Epithalamion, a beautiful and complex wedding poem in honor of his marriage in 1594, were also published. Fowre Hymnes, which explains Spenser's Platonic and Christian views of love and beauty, and Prothalamion appeared in 1596. Also in 1596 the first six books of The Faerie Queene, Spenser's unfinished masterpiece, appeared. Although the poem is an epic, his method was to treat the moral virtues allegorically. The excellence of The Faerie Queene lies in the complexity and depth of Spenser's moral vision and in the Spenserian stanza (nine lines, eight of iambic pentameter followed by one of iambic hexameter, rhyming ababbcbcc), which Spenser invented for his masterpiece. Spenser's only extended prose work, A View of the Present State of Ireland, was first printed in 1633.

See variorum edition of his works (ed. by E. Greenlaw et al., 1932–49), the three-volume edition of the poetical works (J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt, 1909–10), and the four-volume edition of the minor works (W. L. Renwick, 1928–34). See biography by A. C. Judson (1945); studies by W. Nelson (1963), W. L. Renwick (1925, repr. 1965), D. Cheney (1966), P. Bayley (1971), A. L. DeNeef (1983), and H. Berger, Jr. (1988); C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936, repr. 1958) and F. Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne (1971).

Show Excerpt Only

16 of the Best Books and Articles on: Edmund Spenser

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Edmund Spenser » Read Now
by Harold Bloom. 292 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Sixteen critical essays on the Elizabethan poet and his works.
2.

The Complete Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser » Read Now
by R. E. Neil Dodge. 852 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF EDMUND SPENSER Students Cambridge Edition...the exact year of the birth of Edmund Spenser, for beyond reasonable doubt that...and if he did...
3.

Edmund Spenser: A Critical Study » Read Now
by Herbert Ellsworth Cory. 477 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 1917 EDMUND SPENSER A Critical Study BY...speaks against my old friend, Edmund Spenser. Archbishop USHER, according...title page as follows: "Ex...
4.

Edmund Spenser: The Critical Heritage » Read Now
by R. M.Cummings. 355 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read the material themselves.
5.

The Poetry of Edmund Spenser: A Study » Read Now
by William Nelson. 350 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...THE POETRY OF EDMUND SPENSER The Poetry of EDMUND SPENSER A STUDY By WILLIAM NELSON COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY...Quotations from Spensers writings are from The Works of Edmund...
6.

Spenser's Faerie Queene: An Interpretation » Read Now
by Janet Spens. 146 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...less on The Faerie Queene than on the Minor poems, and my book was too far advanced to be much affected by the Edmund Spenser of Mr. B. E. C. Davis. I am deeply indebted to...
7.

Spenser's Shepheardes Calender: A Study in Elizabethan Allegory » Read Now
by Paul E. McLane. 372 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...be found in H. J. Byrom , "Edmund Spensers First Printer, Hugh Singleton...stumbling block in the poetry of Edmund Spenser and perhaps will always remain...A. C. Judson...
8.

A Spenser Handbook » Read Now
by H. S. V. Jones. 424 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...A SPENSER HANDBOOK EDMUND SPENSER From an Engraving by W. B. Scott...Captain Thomas Norris, and Edmund Spenser. To this group of friends their...in 1589 brought suit...
9.

The New Poet: Novelty and Tradition in Spenser's Complaints » Read Now
by Richard Danson Brown. 288 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

This gracefully written and well thought-out study deals with a neglected collection of poems by Spenser, which was issued in 1591 at the height of his career. While there has been a good deal written in recent years on two of the poems in the collection, "Mother Hubberd’s Tale" and...
Read More

This gracefully written and well thought-out study deals with a neglected collection of poems by Spenser, which was issued in 1591 at the height of his career. While there has been a good deal written in recent years on two of the poems in the collection, "Mother Hubberd’s Tale" and "Muiopotmos", Brown innovatively addresses the collection in its entirety. He urges us to see it as a planned whole with a consistent design on the reader: he fully acknowledges, and even brings out further, the heterogeneity of the collection, but he examines it nevertheless as a sustained reflection on the nature of poetry and the auspices for writing in a modern world, distancing itself from the traditions of the immediate past. The strength of this work lies both in the originality of its project and in the precision and enterprise of the close reading that informs its argument. Interest in the concern of Spenser’s poetry with the nature of poetry is in the current critical mainstream, but here the attentiveness is both unusually focused and unusually sustained. Brown garners more than would be expected from the translations in the Complaints, while at the same time including striking and individual chapters on the better known "Mother Hubberd’s Tale" and "Muiopotmos"; he advances understanding of these extremely subtle texts and fully justifies his wider approach to the collection as a whole. Arguing that Spenser’s relationship to literary tradition is more complex than is often thought, Brown suggests that Spenser was a self-conscious innovator whose gradual move away from traditional poetics is exhibited by the different texts in the Complaints. He further suggests that the Complaints are a "poetics in practice", which progress from traditional ideas of poetry to a new poetry that emerges through Spenser’s transformation of traditional complaint.
Show less
10.

Contemporary Thought on Edmund Spenser » Read Now
by Richard C. Frushell, Bernard J. Vondersmith. 240 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...Contemporary Thought on Edmund Spenser With a Bibliography of Criticism...1935-- Contemporary thought on Edmund Spenser. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1...
11.

Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser: Selected Papers from the English Institute » Read Now
by William Nelson. 188 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser FORM AND CONVENTION IN THE POETRY OF EDMUND SPENSER Selected Papers from the English Institute...represent the current...
12.

Studies in Spenser, Milton and the Theory of Monarchy » Read Now
by Ruth Mohl. 144 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...quote from B. E. C. Davis Edmund Spenser ; and to the Clarendon Press...ed., The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser London: Oxford University...in his article "On the Life of...
13.

English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance ("Edmund Spenser" begins on p. 185) » Read Now
by O. B. Hardison Jr. 340 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...PRACTICAL CRITICISM EDMUND SPENSER 185 Preface to...culminating in the work of Tasso, Spenser, and Milton, to rival Virgil...justifications of specific forms. Spenser...
14.

Spenser's Life and the Subject of Biography » Read Now
by Judith H. Anderson, Donald Cheney, David A. Richardson. 215 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

On the 400th anniversary of The Faerie Queene, this book challenges the received tradition of Spenser's biography. The first "life" of Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-99) was written by the poet himself, in allegorical fictions of poetic ambition, envy, and anxiety. Over succeeding centuries, readers have...
Read More

On the 400th anniversary of The Faerie Queene, this book challenges the received tradition of Spenser's biography. The first "life" of Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-99) was written by the poet himself, in allegorical fictions of poetic ambition, envy, and anxiety. Over succeeding centuries, readers have tried to revise and elaborate this life with reference to a handful of surviving records and a wealth of dubiously pertinent historical fact and gossip. The nine essays in this volume examine the history of Spenser biography and suggest strategies for reinterpreting it to an audience newly sensitive to problems of artistic self-presentation.
Show less
15.

Shakespeare & Spenser » Read Now
by W. B. C. Watkins. 342 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...detachment. But fairness requires of us historical perspective: in the eyes of a gentle, scholarly predecessor of Spensers in Ireland, Edmund Campion, an Englishman not...
16.

Spenser's Minor Poems » Read Now
by Ernest de Selincourt. 530 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library