6 November, 2022
Hello dear friends, here I am writing a blog on a great poet Edmund Spenser.
Edmund Spenser
∆ Why is Edmund Spenser called the poet's poet ?
→ Introduction :
The Elizabethan era in England was a great time for poets, who thrived and created myriad poetic forms and influential works that are still read today. Major poets of the age include William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser.
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 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.
Edmund Spenser is an English poet known primarily for his epic poem The Faerie Queene. He lived from the mid to late 16th century, and was a contemporary with Queen Elizabeth I and other celebrated artists like Shakespeare.
The Faerie Queene is his magnum opus, and was never finished in his lifetime. It presented an allegorical fantasy tale set in King Arthur’s Britain, representing much of the religious and political climate of the time.
Today, Edmund Spenser is recognized as one of the best poets of his time, even going so far as to invent the Spenserian Stanza, his own rhyme scheme and structure for poetry.
→Born: 1552/1553, London, England
→Died:January 13, 1599, London,England
→Notable Works: The Faerie Queene (1590)
→Education: Pembroke College, Cambridge
→Wives: Machabyas Childe and Elizabeth Boyle
→Children: Sylvanus and Katherine
∆ THE EARLY LIFE OF EDMUND SPENSER :
In 1552, Edmund Spenser was born into a poor family. While he was related to a noble family that raised sheep, his immediate family did not have much.
As a boy, he was entered into the Merchant Taylors’ grammar school as a “poor boy”, meaning his family did not have a lot of money. At the school he would learn Latin, Hebrew, Greek, and the musical arts. In 1569, as a teenager, Edmund Spenser translated some French poems, written by Joachim du Bellay, into English. Later, his translation of a poem by the Italian poet Petrarch was published at the beginning of an anti-Catholic publication “A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings”.
Beginning in May 1569, Spenser attended Cambridge University at Pembroke Hall, now known as Pembroke College. Once again, he was not a wealthy student, he was labeled a “sizar”, which is a student who had to perform menial tasks in order to make up for the financial disparity.
In 1573, he received his Bachelor of Arts.
In 1574, he left the college due to an epidemic.
In 1576, he received his Master of Arts.
In 1578, he spent some time as a secretary to the Bishop of Rochester, a man named John Young.
And it was in 1579 that he published his first major work: The Shepheardes Calender. Around this same time he married his first wife, Machabyas Childe. Together, they would have two children: Sylvanus and Katherine.
∆ LATER LIFE AND DEATH OF EDMUND SPENSER :
Spenser would publish three more books of The Faerie Queene in 1596, and he returned to Ireland to continue writing in 1597.However, most of the work he completed after that was lost, and we do not know the full extent of what he wrote. All we have are two Cantos from book 7 of the Faerie Queene.
In 1598, he was named Sheriff of Cork, but it was in the same year that he was forced to flee Ireland with his family.
Later in 1598, he arrived in London, presenting his situation to the Queen, but it was soon after this that he fell ill, and he would eventually die in London on January 16, 1599.
∆ WRITING STYLE :
Spenser invented his own distinctive form of poetic verse, now known as the Spenserian stanza. He used it in multiple works, most notably in The Faerie Queen.
The stanza is 9 lines in total, has a metre of iambic pentameter for the first 8 lines, with the last line in iambic hexameter.
It also has a distinctive rhyme scheme of ababbcbccdcdee.
Here is an example taken from the first Canto of The Faerie Queene:
A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,
Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,
The cruel markes of many’a bloudy fielde;
Yet armes till that time did he never wield:
His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,
As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:
Full jolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,
As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.
Spenser would also adapt this form into a longer “Spenserian sonnet.” Here is a prime example from Amoretti, a poem addressed to his second wife Elizabeth Boyle:
“Men call you fair, and you do credit it,
For that your self ye daily such do see:
But the true fair, that is the gentle wit,
And vertuous mind, is much more prais’d of me.
For all the rest, how ever fair it be,
Shall turn to naught and lose that glorious hue:
But only that is permanent and free
From frail corruption, that doth flesh ensue.
That is true beauty: that doth argue you
To be divine, and born of heavenly seed:
Deriv’d from that fair Spirit, from whom all true
And perfect beauty did at first proceed.
He only fair, and what he fair hath made,
All other fair, like flowers untimely fade.”
∆ NOTABLE WORKS BY EDMUND SPENSER :
→ The Shepheardes Calender (1579 )
→ The Faerie Queene (Books 1-3 in 1589, Books 4-6 in 1596)
→A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596)
→Short Poetry Collections
∆ Spenser as "the poet’s poet":
Edmund Spenser was first called the ''poet's poet'' in an essay by Charles Lamb. He used this phrase to express that Spenser's work was very popular among other poets, which was true. Spenser's work was highly crafted and the specifics of the poetic form meant a lot to him. In some ways, his work was better appreciated by other poets, who could see in detail the innovations that he had created.
It was Charles Lamb who called Spenser “the poet’s poet” and lamb was not wrong in giving him that honored title. Spenser is regarded as the poet’s poet and the second father of English poetry and Chaucer is the first.
Spenser gives a higher conception of poetry and he did something new which other poets before him had not dared. His faith in the immortality of poetry and the greatness of the poet's vocation have rightly entitled him to be recognized as the poet's poet.
While Spenser composed his own verses, he transcended them and beat them hollow in their own line. Spenser has improved English diction, style and versification. He enriched the English language and made it musical. His mixture of the old English words with syntax produced something new for English poetry. He enriched the English language by importing foreign words and by coining new words. He realized that for the purpose of great English poetry. There was a need for a new language. He altered words, made one word do the duty of another, interchanged actives and passives, transferred epithets from their proper subjects and gave them any shape that the case may demand. In this way, he created a truly royal style, beautiful, feasible and magnificent.
Spenser's verbal melody and music based on the use of onomatopoetic words, proper employment of vowels and consonants, alliteration, is something unique in English poetry. Shelley, Keats, Tennyson and Swinburne learnt the melody of their verse from Spenser.From very old times divergent opinions have been held about the function of poetry and art. Moralists like Plato have emphasized that poetry should be moral and should be an instrument of moral edification. But those who advocated art for art's sake has considered the poet as a ministering angel of joy and delight. Art in their opinion is for joy. Spenser harmonized both these views in his poetry. To a profound moral tone he added the greases and charms of beauty, loveliness decoration and picturesqueness. He beautifully blended the message of the Renaissance and the Reformation in his poetry. He came to be regarded as the writer for artists because of his insistence on beauty, love, richness, exuberance and pageants.
Thus Spenser exercised the deepest influence on a hoist of poets in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. For his great service to English poetry he is called the poet's poet.
→ Why is Spenser called a poet's poet?
→Universal subject matter(Greek theology and mythology) .
→Spenser followed Artiosto’s moral traditions and Tasso’s romantic tradition .
→Inspired by Virgil’s pastoral poetry.
→Philosophical tradition of Plato/ Aristotle .
→One of the important reasons is because he started writing in the beginning phase of English poetry.
→Spenser was the first poet who wrote epic (The Faerie Queen)
→ Only great poets can understand. Spenser’s poetry .
→ Conclusion :
As a poet Spenser was a highly busy man of affairs but he never put aside the poet in him. He always writes like an idealist. He never entertains humour in his poetry.
Thank you...
Words : 1529
