Spenser, Edmund (1552–1599)

English poet and essayist who was an important figure in the founding of a new English poetic tradition during the Renaissance. The son of a tailor, Spenser was born in London, where he attended the Merchant Taylors' School. He enrolled at Cambridge, where he studied classical Latin and Greek writing, worked as a servant to wealthier students, and translated poetry of the medieval Italian poet Petrarch. After earning a master's degree in 1576, he became secretary to John Young, the bishop of Rochester, in 1578, and joined a literary circle led by Sir Philip Sidney. In Rochester he began work on his first major poem, The Shepherd's Calendar, which was published in 1579. A series of twelve poems that imitated the allegorical Latin poetry of Virgil, The Shepherd's Calendar disguised praise of Queen Elizabeth and the Tudor dynasty, and biting commentaries on current events in England, with the form of “pastoral” poetry and imagined conversations among shepherds. The success of this volume encouraged Spenser in the laborious endeavor of writing a much larger and more difficult epic poem, The Faerie Queene, which would be his major work of poetry.

On considering the meager prospects for poets, Spenser sought to win a secure position in government service, and took up the study of law. In 1580 he gained an appointment as the secretary to Lord Grey, England's lord deputy of Ireland. He spent much of the rest of his life in Ireland where, after helping to put down a rebellion by the Irish natives, he was rewarded with a three thousand—acre country estate in Kilcolman, County Cork, which he intended as a center of English settlement and colonization. In early 1590, the first three books of The Faerie Queene appeared in London. Dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, the poem was a celebration of the rise of the English nation and England's identity as a Protestant land that stood in proud independence from the Catholic Church and its medieval institutions. Spenser took as his model the twelve books of Virgil's Aeneid, the national epic of ancient Rome. Each of the twelve books of The Faerie Queene was to consider one of the twelve moral virtues of Aristotle, as seen through the life and acts of a chivalric knight modeled on the heroes of Arthurian legend. The poem would become a national epic of England, but also a grand allegory that combined Christian morality with ancient philosophies of Aristotle and Plato. For this work Spenser developed a new poetic form, the nine-line “Spenserian stanza,” which was taken up by major English poets in the following centuries. Although written in archaic language and relying on the medieval traditions of chivalry, Spenser's inspiration by classical pagan philosophies made his poem a truly Renaissance work.

The Faerie Queene was considered a great work when it was published, but Spenser failed in his efforts to win a lucrative position at court. Having received fame and a substantial income from sales of the work, he returned to Ireland from London in 1591. He published a collection of shorter poems under the title Complaints. He also wrote an autobiographical poem entitled Colin Clout's Come Home Again, describing his life and fame in London and his attempts to fit in to the life of the royal court. Readers and critics praised his Amoretti, love sonnets in the style of the Italian poet Torquato Tasso, and his Epithalamion, an ode to love and marriage that he wrote on the occasion of his wedding to Elizabeth Boyle. His bestknown essay, View of the Present State of Ireland, supported the policies of Lord Grey and suggested a new program for English administration of Ireland, in which the Irish language and culture would be suppressed and replaced with what was in his view the superior moral and cultural life of the English. As the work was critical of England's policy, it was not published until well after the author's death.

Spenser published three more books of The Faerie Queene in 1595, but his ambition to create an epic in twelve books was not accomplished. In 1598 he became the sheriff of Cork. Soon after this a rebellion broke out and he was forced to flee his home, which was destroyed by the rebels. After returning to London and giving a report to the queen on his experience in Ireland, he became ill and died. By this time regarded as one of the finest poets in England, he was buried with honors in Westminster Abbey. The Faerie Queene became one of the most influential poetic works in English, and inspired later poets from John Milton to William Wordsworth.

See Also: Elizabeth I; England; Milton, John; Shakespeare, William