Edmund Spenser | English poet | Britannica.com Edmund Spenser John Taylor Edmund Spenser, (born 1552/53, London , England —died January 13, 1599, London), English poet whose long allegorical poem The Faerie Queene is one of the greatest in the English language. It was written in what came to be called the Spenserian stanza . Edmund Spenser, oil painting by an unknown artist; in the collection of Pembroke College, … Courtesy of the Master and Fellows, Pembroke College, Cambridge, Eng. Youth and education Little is certainly known about Spenser. He was related to a noble Midlands family of Spencer, whose fortunes had been made through sheep raising. His own immediate family was not wealthy. He was entered as a “poor boy” in the Merchant Taylors’ grammar school, where he would have studied mainly Latin, with some Hebrew, Greek, and music.

In 1569, when Spenser was about 16 years old, his English versions of poems by the 16th-century French poet Joachim du Bellay and his translation of a French version of a poem by the Italian poet Petrarch appeared at the beginning of an anti-Catholic prose tract, A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings; they were no doubt commissioned by its chief author, the wealthy Flemish expatriate Jan Baptista van der Noot . (Some of these poems Spenser later revised for his Complaints volume.) From May 1569 Spenser was a student in Pembroke Hall (now Pembroke College) of the University of Cambridge , where, along with perhaps a quarter of the students, he was classed as a sizar—a student who, out of financial necessity, performed various menial or semi-menial duties. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1573. Because of an epidemic , Spenser left Cambridge in 1574, but he received the Master of Arts degree in 1576.

His best-known friend at Cambridge was the slightly older Gabriel Harvey , a fellow of Pembroke, who was learned, witty, and enthusiastic for ancient and modern literature but also pedantic , devious , and ambitious. There is no reason to believe that Spenser shared the most distasteful of these qualities, but, in the atmosphere of social mobility and among the new aristocracy of Tudor England, it is not surprising that he hoped for preferment to higher position. Spenser’s period at the University of Cambridge was undoubtedly important for the acquisition of his wide knowledge not only of the Latin and some of the Greek classics but also of the Italian, French, and English literature of his own and earlier times. His knowledge of the traditional forms and themes of lyrical and narrative poetry provided foundations for him to build his own highly original compositions . Without the Roman epic poet Virgil ’s Aeneid, the 15th-century Italian Ludovico Ariosto ’s Orlando furioso, and, later, Torquato Tasso ’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), Spenser could not have written his heroic, or epic, poem The Faerie Queene.

Without Virgil’s Bucolics and the later tradition of pastoral poetry in Italy and France, Spenser could not have written The Shepheardes Calender. And without the Latin, Italian, and French examples of the highly traditional marriage ode and the sonnet and canzone forms of Petrarch and succeeding sonneteers, Spenser could not have written his greatest lyric, Epithalamion, and its accompanying sonnets, Amoretti. The patterns of meaning in Spenser’s poetry are frequently woven out of the traditional interpretations—developed through classical times and his own—of pagan myth , divinities, and philosophies and out of an equally strong experience of the faith and doctrines of Christianity; these patterns he further enriched by the use of medieval and contemporary story, legend , and folklore. Britannica Stories Ringling Bros. Folds Its Tent Spenser’s religious training was a most important part of his education.

He could not have avoided some involvement in the bitter struggles that took place in his university over the path the new Church of England was to tread between Roman Catholicism and extreme Puritanism, and his own poetry repeatedly engages with the opposition between Protestantism and Catholicism and the need to protect the national and moral purity of the Elizabethan church. Contrary to a former view, there is little reason to believe that he inclined toward the Puritanical side. His first known appointment (after a blank of several years, when he may have been in the north of England) was in 1578 as secretary to Bishop John Young of Rochester, former master of Spenser’s college at Cambridge. Spenser’s first important publication, The Shepheardes Calender (1579 or 1580), is more concerned with the bishops and affairs of the English church than is any of his later work. Early works Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies The Calender consists of 12 eclogues, one named after each month of the year. One of the shepherds, Colin Clout, who excels in poetry but is ruined by his hopeless love for one Rosalind, is Spenser himself.

The eclogue “Aprill” is in praise of the shepherdess Elisa, really the queen (Elizabeth I) herself. “October” examines the various kinds of verse composition and suggests how discouraging it is for a modern poet to try for success in any of them. Most of the eclogues, however, concern good or bad shepherds—that is to say, pastors—of Christian congregations. The Calender was well received in its day, and it is still a revelation of what could be done poetically in English after a long period of much mediocrity and provinciality. The archaic quality of its language, sometimes deplored, was partly motivated by a desire to continue older English poetic traditions, such as that of Geoffrey Chaucer . Archaic vocabulary is not so marked a feature of Spenser’s later work. The years 1578–80 probably produced more changes in Spenser’s life than did any other corresponding period.

He appears by 1580 to have been serving the fascinating, highly placed, and unscrupulous Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester and to have become a member of the literary circle led by Sir Philip Sidney , Leicester’s nephew, to whom the Calender was dedicated and who praised it in his important critical work The Defence of Poesie (1595). Spenser remained permanently devoted to this brilliant writer and good nobleman, embodied him variously in his own poetry, and mourned his early death in an elegy. By 1580 Spenser had also started work on The Faerie Queene, and in the previous year he had apparently married one Machabyas Chylde. Interesting sidelights on his personal character, of which next to nothing is known, are given in a small collection of letters between Spenser and Gabriel Harvey that was printed in 1580. The ironies in that exchange of letters are so intricate, however, as to make it difficult to draw many conclusions from them about Spenser, except that he was young, ambitious, accomplished, and sincerely interested in the theory and practice of poetry.

In 1580 Spenser was made secretary to the new lord deputy of Ireland , Arthur Lord Grey, who was a friend of the Sidney family. Career in Ireland Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest Sixteenth-century Ireland and the Irish were looked on by the English as a colony, although the supposed threat of an invasion by Spain and the conflict between an imposed English church and the Roman Catholicism of the Irish were further complicating factors. Irish chieftains and the Anglo-Irish nobility encouraged native resistance to newly arrived English officials and landowners. As Grey’s secretary, Spenser accompanied the lord deputy on risky military campaigns as well as on more routine journeys. He may have witnessed the Smerwick massacre (1580), and his poetry is haunted by nightmare characters who embody a wild lawlessness. The conflict between Grey’s direct, drastic governmental measures and the queen’s characteristic procrastinating and temporizing style soon led to Grey’s frustration and recall. But Spenser, like many others, admired and defended Grey’s methods.

Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (written 1595–96, published 1633), a later tract, argues lucidly for a typically 16th-century theory of rule: firm measures, ruthlessly applied, with gentleness only for completely submissive subject populations. A discussion of English colonization of the vast estates in Munster, Ireland, that belonged to the … Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library; CC-BY-SA 4.0 (A Britannica Publishing Partner) For four or five years from roughly 1584, Spenser carried out the duties of a second important official position in Ireland, deputizing for his friend Lodowick Bryskett as clerk of the lords president (governors) of Munster, the southernmost Irish province. The fruits of his service in Ireland are plain. He was given a sinecure post and other favours, including the right to dispose of certain forfeited parcels of land (he no doubt indulged in profitable land speculation). For a time he leased the small property of New Abbey, County Kildare, and on this basis was first designated “gentleman.” Finally, he obtained a much larger estate in Munster.

One of the chief preoccupations of the presidents of this province, scarred as it was by war and starvation, was to repopulate it. To this end, large “plantations” were awarded to English “undertakers,” who undertook to make them self-sustaining by occupying them with Englishmen of various trades. In 1588 or 1589 Spenser took over the 3,000-acre (1,200-hectare) plantation of Kilcolman, about 25 miles (40 km) to the north and a little to the west of Cork. No doubt he took there his son and daughter and his wife, if she was still alive (she is known to have died by 1594, when Spenser married Elizabeth Boyle, a "kinswoman" of the earl of Cork, one of Ireland’s wealthiest men). By acquiring this estate, Spenser made his choice for the future: to rise into the privileged class of what was, to all intents, a colonial land of opportunity rather than to seek power and position on the more crowded ground of the homeland, where he had made his poetic reputation.

In his new situation he, like other undertakers, had much conflict with the local Anglo-Irish aristocracy and had limited success in filling the plantations with English families. Nevertheless, it was under these conditions that Spenser brought his greatest poetry to completion. The Faerie Queene and last years Trending Topics Eyjafjallajökull volcano In its present form, The Faerie Queene consists of six books and a fragment (known as the “Mutabilitie Cantos”). According to Spenser’s introductory letter in the first edition (1590) of his great poem , it was to contain 12 books, each telling the adventure of one of Gloriana’s knights. Like other poets, Spenser must have modified his general plan many times, yet this letter, inconsistent though it is with various plot details in the books that are extant , is probably a faithful mirror of his thinking at one stage.

The stories actually published were those of Holiness (the Red Cross Knight), Temperance (Sir Guyon), Chastity (Britomart, a female knight), Friendship (ostensibly concerning Triamond and Cambello, although these play a small part), Justice (Artegall), and Courtesy (Calidore). As a setting Spenser invented the land of Faerie and its queen, Gloriana. To express himself he invented a nine-line stanza , the first eight of five stresses and the last of six, whose rhyme pattern is ababbcbcc. Title page of the first edition of The Faerie Queene (1590) by Edmund … © Bettmann/Corbis Illustration from an edition of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

Photos.com/Jupiterimages What is most characteristic of Spenser in The Faerie Queene is his serious view of the capacity of the romance form to act as a paradigm of human experience: the moral life as quest, pilgrimage, aspiration; as eternal war with an enemy, still to be known; and as encounter, crisis, the moment of illumination—in short, as ethics , with the added dimensions of mystery, terror, love, and victory and with all the generous virtues exalted. Modern readers’ impatience with the obscure allusions in the poem, with its political and ecclesiastical topicalities, is a failure to share the great conflict of Spenser’s time between Protestant England and Roman Catholic Spain; to Spenser, the war between good and evil was here and now. In The Faerie Queene Spenser proves himself a master: picture, music, metre, story —all elements are at one with the deeper significance of his poem, providing a moral heraldry of colours, emblems, legends , folklore, and mythical allusion , all prompting deep, instinctive responses. The poem was published with the help of Sir Walter Raleigh , who owned large lands to the east of Spenser’s estate.

He and the poet came together at Kilcolman in 1589 and became well acquainted with one another’s poetry. Spenser implies that Raleigh persuaded Spenser to accompany him back to England to present the completed portion of The Faerie Queene to Queen Elizabeth herself. The history of this episode is charmingly evoked in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (completed 1595), which is also one of Spenser’s most effective pastoral embodiments of a provincial innocent up against the sophistications of a centre of power, with subsequent reflections on false, superficial love and the true love that finally animates a concordant universe. Arriving thus in London with the support of the queen’s favourite, Spenser was well received—not least by Elizabeth herself. The first three books of The Faerie Queene were duly published in 1590, together with a dedication to her and commendatory sonnets to notables of the court. Spenser saw the book through the press, made a hurried visit to Ireland, and returned speedily to London—presumably in the hope of preferment.

At this time he supervised the printing of certain other of his poems in a collection called Complaints (1591), many of which had probably been written earlier in his career and were now being published so as to profit from the great success of his new heroic poem. It is difficult to believe that the many titles of poems that have not survived but were mentioned earlier in his career were not published in revised form and under other titles in his known work, for Complaints suggests by its miscellaneous and uneven character that Spenser was hastily bringing to the light of day nearly every last shred that he had to offer; early translations, an elegy, and the delightful mock-heroic poem “ Muiopotmos ” are contained in it. Another item, the beast fable Prosopopoia; or, Mother Hubberd’s Tale, apparently caused the authorities to withdraw unsold copies of the volume (perhaps in 1592) because it contained a covert attack on Lord Burghley , who was one of the most powerful figures of the court. Nevertheless, in 1591 Queen Elizabeth gave Spenser a small pension for life. Back in Ireland, Spenser pressed on with his writing, in spite of the burdens of his estate.

In early 1595 he published Amoretti and Epithalamion , a sonnet sequence and a marriage ode celebrating his marriage to Elizabeth Boyle after what appears to have been an impassioned courtship in 1594. This group of poems is unique among Renaissance sonnet sequences in that it celebrates a successful love affair culminating in marriage. The Epithalamion further idealizes the marriage by building into its structure the symbolic numbers 24 (the number of stanzas) and 365 (the total number of long lines), allowing the poem to allude to the structure of the day and of the year. The marriage is thus connected with the encompassing harmonies of the universe, and the cyclical processes of change and renewal are expressed in the procreation of the two mortal lovers. However, matters are less harmonious in Books IV, V, and VI of The Faerie Queene, which appeared in 1596 and are strikingly more ambiguous and ironic than the first three books. Book V includes much direct allegory of some of the most problematic political events of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and Book VI’s Sir Calidore is a far less confident and effective fairy knight than his predecessors were.

In the only surviving fragment of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609), Spenser represents Elizabeth herself as subject to Mutability, the inexorable processes of aging and change. This burst of publication was the last of his lifetime. His early death may have been precipitated by the penetration into Munster of the Irish uprising of 1598. The undertakers and other loyalists failed to make headway against this. Kilcolman was burned, and Spenser, probably in despair despite the Privy Council’s having just recommended his appointment to the important post of sheriff of Cork, carried official letters about the desperate state of affairs from the president to London, where he died. He was buried with ceremony in Westminster Abbey close by the grave of Geoffrey Chaucer. Assessment Spenser was considered in his day to be the greatest of English poets, who had glorified England and its language by his long allegorical poem The Faerie Queene, just as Virgil had glorified Rome and the Latin tongue by his epic poem the Aeneid.

Spenser had a strong influence upon his immediate successors, and the sensuous features of his poetic style, as well as his nine-line stanza form, were later admired and imitated by such poets as Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Romantic period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He is widely studied today as one of the chief begetters of the English literary Renaissance and as a master who embodied in poetic myth a view of the virtuous life in a Christian universe. Edmund Spenser - Poet | Academy of American Poets Academy of American Poets The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

browse poems & poets poet Edmund Spenser Edmund Spenser was born in London in the year 1552 or 1553. Little is known about his family or his childhood, except that he received a scholarship to attend the Merchant Taylor School, where he likely studied Latin and Greek. He went on to study literature and religion at Cambridge University’s Pembroke Hall, receiving a BA in 1573 and an MA in 1576. Spenser published his first volume of poetry, The Shepheardes Calender (Hugh Singleton), in 1579, dedicating it to the poet Sir Philip Sidney . He was also the author of The Faerie Queene (William Ponsonby, 1596), a major English epic, and Amoretti and Epithalamion (William Ponsonby, 1595), a sonnet sequence dedicated to his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle. Alongside his poetry, Spenser pursued a career in politics, serving as a secretary first for the Bishop of Rochester and then for the Earl of Leicester, who introduced him to other poets and artists in Queen Elizabeth’s court.

In 1580, he was appointed secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland; later, in 1596, he wrote an inflammatory pamphlet called A View of the Present State of Ireland (James Ware, 1633). In 1598, during the Nine Years War, Spenser was driven from his home in Ireland. He died in London in 1599 and was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Edmund Spenser :: English Language Poet :: English Poetry This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!) Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. This article has been tagged since April 2007. Edmund Spenser "Spenser" redirects here. For the detective novel character, see Spenser (character). For the Frontier Brain, see Spenser (Pokémon). Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–13 January 1599) was an English poet and Poet Laureate.

Spenser is a controversial figure due to his zeal for the destruction of Irish culture and colonisation of Ireland, yet he is one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy. Spenser is best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem celebrating, through fantastical allegory, the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. Contents 4 External links Life Spenser was born about 1552. As a boy, he was educated in London at the Merchant Taylors' School and matriculated as a sizar at Pembroke College, Cambridge. [1] In the 1570s Spenser went to Ireland, probably in the service of the newly appointed lord deputy, Arthur Grey. From 1579 to 1580, 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!" In the early 1590s Spenser wrote a prose pamphlet titled, A View of the Present State of Ireland. This piece remained in manuscript form until its publication in 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. The paradox proposed by Spenser was that only by methods that overrode the rule of law could the conditions be created for the true establishment of the rule of law.

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. Spenser was driven from his home by Irish rebels during the Nine Years War in 1598. 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 know 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 before she died. 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, among others. The language of his poetry is purposely archaic. It reminds readers 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. 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 This article contains a trivia section. The article could be improved by integrating relevant items into the main text and removing inappropriate items.

This article has been tagged since June 2007. 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) shows 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. Houses at two well-known English Public Schools are named after Spenser - Merchant Taylors' School, which he attended, and Dulwich College.

List of works The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596, 1609) Complaints Containing sundrie small Poemes of the Worlds Vanitie (1591) The Ruines of Time The Teares of the Muses Virgil's Gnat Edmund Spenser Poems Poetry.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2016. Web. 18 Dec. 2016. < Spenser >. Missing a poem of Edmund Spenser? Know another great poem from Edmund Spenser? Don't keep it to yourself! Add it Here Edmund Spenser - Wikiquote Edmund Spenser I learned have, not to despise, What ever thing seemes small in common eyes . Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 – January 13 , 1599 ) was an English poet, who wrote such pastorals as The Shepheardes Calendar, Astrophell and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, but is most famous for the multi-layered allegorical romance, The Faerie Queene . Contents For of the soule the bodie forme doth take; For the soule is forme, and doth the bodie make.

For all that faire is, is by nature good ; That is a signe to know the gentle blood. I trow that countenance cannot lie, Whose thoughts are legible in the eie. An Elegie, or Friends Passion, for his Astrophill, Line 108 (1586). Death slue not him, but he made death his ladder to the skies. Another [Epitaph] of the Same, line 20 (1586). I learned have, not to despise, What ever thing seemes small in common eyes. Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, line 69 (1591). For of the soule the bodie forme doth take; For the soule is forme, and doth the bodie make. An Hymne in Honour of Beautie, line 132 (1596). For all that faire is, is by nature good; That is a signe to know the gentle blood. An Hymne in Honour of Beautie, line 139.

To kerke the narre from God more farre, Has bene an old-sayd sawe; And he that strives to touche a starre Oft stombles at a strawe. The Shepheardes Calender, July, line 97; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Full little knowest thou that hast not tride, What hell it is in suing long to bide: To loose good dayes, that might be better spent; To wast long nights in pensive discontent; To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow; To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow. . . . . . . . . . To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares; To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires; 13 To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne, To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne. Unhappie wight, borne to desastrous end, That doth his life in so long tendance spend!

Mother Hubberds Tale, line 895; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). What more felicitie can fall to creature Than to enjoy delight with libertie, And to be lord of all the workes of Nature, To raine in th' aire from earth to highest skie, To feed on flowres and weeds of glorious feature. Muiopotmos: or, The Fate of the Butterflie, line 209; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). I hate the day, because it lendeth light To see all things, but not my love to see. Daphnaida, v. 407; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Tell her the joyous Time will not be staid, Unlesse she doe him by the forelock take. Amoretti, lxx; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

I was promised on a time To have reason for my rhyme; From that time unto this season, I received nor rhyme nor reason. Lines on his Promised Pension; reported in Thomas Fuller , Worthies of England, vol ii, page 379, and in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Behold, whiles she before the altar stands, Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes, And blesseth her with his two happy hands. Epithalamion, line 223; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Calm was the day, and through the trembling air Sweet-breathing Zephyrus did softly play— A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay Hot Titan's beams, which then did glister fair Line 1. Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song. The last line of each stanza This is often attributed to T. S. Eliot , who does indeed quote it in The Waste Land.

With that I saw two swans of goodly hue Come softly swimming down along the Lee: Two fairer birds I yet did never see; The snow which doth the top of Pindus strow Did never whiter show, Nor Jove himself, when he a swan would be For love of Leda, whiter did appear Line 37. Fierce warres and faithfull loves shall moralize my song. Introduction, stanza 1. A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine. Canto 1, stanza 1. But of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad; Yet nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad. Canto 1, stanza 2. The noblest mind the best contentment has. Canto 1, stanza 35. A bold bad man, that dar'd to call by name Great Gorgon, Prince of darknesse and dead night. Canto 1, stanza 37. As the great eye of heaven, shyned bright, And made a sunshine in the shady place. Canto 3, stanza 4.

Ay me, how many perils doe enfold The righteous man, to make him daily fall! Canto 8, stanza 1. As when in Cymbrian plaine An heard of bulles, whom kindly rage doth sting, Doe for the milky mothers want complaine, And fill the fieldes with troublous bellowing. Canto 8, stanza 11. Entire affection hateth nicer hands. Canto 8, stanza 40. That darksome cave they enter, where they find That cursed man, low sitting on the ground, Musing full sadly in his sullein mind. Canto 9, stanza 35. Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease, And layes the soul to sleepe in quiet grave? Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please. Canto 9, stanza 40. Whereon thy innocent feet doe ever tread! Canto 10, stanza 9.

No daintie flowre or herbe that growes on grownd, No arborett with painted blossoms drest And smelling sweete, but there it might be fownd To bud out faire, and throwe her sweete smels al arownd. Canto 6, stanza 12. And is there care in Heaven? And is there love In heavenly spirits to these Creatures bace? Canto 8, stanza 1. How oft do they their silver bowers leave To come to succour us that succour want! Canto 8, stanza 2. And all for love, and nothing for reward. Canto 8, stanza 2. Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound. Canto 12, stanza 70. Through thicke and thin, both over banke and bush In hope her to attaine by hooke or crooke. Canto 1, stanza 17.

Into the woods thenceforth in hast she went, To seeke for hearbes, that mote him remedy; For she of hearbes had great intendiment, Taught of the Nymphe, which from her infancy Her nourced had in trew Nobility: There, whether it divine Tobacco were, Or Panachaea, or Polygony, She found, and brought it to her patient deare Who al this while lay bleeding out his hart-bloud neare. Canto 5, stanza 32. Her berth was of the wombe of morning dew, And her conception of the joyous Prime. Canto 6, stanza 3. Roses red and violets blew, And all the sweetest flowres that in the forrest grew. Canto 6, stanza 6. 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 same roomes upper end, Another yron dore, on which was writ, Be not too bold.

Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled, On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled. Canto 2, stanza 32. For all that Nature by her mother-wit Could frame in earth. As withered weed through cruell winters tine, That feeles the warmth of sunny beames reflection, Liftes up his head, that did before decline And gins to spread his leafe before the faire sunshine. Canto 12, stanza 34. Me seemes the world is runne quite out of square, From the first point of his appointed sourse, And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse. Introduction, stanza 1. Who will not mercie unto others show, How can he mercy ever hope to have? Canto 2, stanza 42. Ill can he rule the great, that cannot reach the small. Canto 2, stanza 43. But Justice, though her dome [doom] she doe prolong, Yet at the last she will her owne cause right. Canto 11, stanza 1.

A monster, which the Blatant beast men call, A dreadfull feend of gods and men ydrad. Canto 12, stanza 37. The gentle minde by gentle deeds is knowne. For a man by nothing is so well bewrayd, As by his manners. David Hume , The History of England , Vol. II (1759), Ch. VII, p. 738. I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it. C. S. Lewis , in a letter to Arthur Greeves (7 March 1916), published in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis : Family Letters, 1905-1931 (2004) edited by Walter Hooper, p. 170. The Fairie Queene makes cinema out of the west's primary principle: to see is to know; to know is to control. The Spenserian eye cuts, wounds, rapes.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990), p. 173. The Faerie Queene is the most extended and extensive meditation on sex in the history of poetry. It charts the entire erotic spectrum, a great chain of being rising from matter to spirit, from the coarsest lust to chastity and romantic idealism. The poem’s themes of sex and politics are parallel: the psyche, like society, must be disciplined by good government. Spenser agrees with the classical and Christian philosophers on the primacy of reason over animal appetites. He looks forward to the Romantic poets, however, in the way that he shows the sex impulse as ultimately daemonic and barbaric, breeding witches and sorcerers of evil allure. Like the Odyssey , The Faerie Queene is a heroic epic in which the masculine must evade female traps or delays. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990), p. 188. Encyclopedic article on Edmund Spenser at Wikipedia Works related to Author:Edmund Spenser at Wikisource Media related to Edmund Spenser at Wikimedia Commons

Question: Which English Poet Laureate wrote "The Faerie Queene"?
Answer: Edmund Spencer