Edmund Spenser

The first comprehensive study of the eighteenth-century response to the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, from editions to influence.

This is a collection of wide-ranging papers on Edmund Spenser, including criticism on the Shepheardes Calender, Spenser's rhymes, his impact on Louis MacNeice, the medieval organizations of the Faerie Queene, on the Mutabilite Cantos, Temperance in Book II, and Friendship in Book IV, Written by younger as well as by well-established scholars, the contributors move quietly away from theoretically dominated criticism, and emphasize the importance of historical criticism, both breaking new ground and recuperating neglected insights and approaches. The introduction describes and defends the current trend towards a renewed historical criticism in Spenser criticism. The papers contribute to our knowledge of Spenser's life as well as to our understanding of his poetry. J. B. Lethbridge lectures at the English seminar at Tubingen University.

Despite all of his acknowledged greatness, almost no one reads Edmund Spenser (1552-99) anymore. Roy Maynard takes the first book of the 'Faerie Queene, ' exploring the concept of Holiness with the character of the Redcross Knight, and makes Spenser accessible again. He does this not by dumbing it down, but by deftly modernizing the spelling, explaining the obscurities in clever asides, and cuing the reader towards the right response. In today's cultural, aesthetic, and educational wars, Spenser is a mighty ally for twenty-first century Christians. Maynard proves himself a worthy mediator between Spenser's time and ours. (Gene Edward Veith)

Edmund Spenser (1559-99) has earned the title "the poet's poet" because of the high poetry of his epic and because so many great poets, including Milton, Dryden, Tennyson, and Keats, cut their poetic teeth on The Faerie Queene. The hero of Book II is Sir Guyon, the knight of Temperance. But do not let that throw you. This is not a poem about teetotalism. As C.S. Lewis puts it, The Faerie Queene "demands of us a child's love of marvels and dread of bogies, a boy's thirst for adventures, a young man's passions for physical beauty." Toby Sumpter's modernization follows Roy Maynard's Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves, and includes similar notes that explain obscure vocabulary and references. Eat this book. Devour it. Read it and then reread it. Make its characters and adventures and lessons and images a part of your mental furniture. Be enchanted. Feed your hunger for fantasy. Exercise your faith. Test your judgment. Form your imagination. Enter Faerie Land.

"The first biography in sixty years of the most important non-dramatic poet of the English Renaissance"--From publisher description.

Edmund Spenser (?1554-99) was the greatest Elizabethan poet, whose Shepheardes Calender (1579) inaugurated a revolution in English poetry, and whose unfinished Faerie Queene (1590-6) was the longest and most accomplished poem written in the sixteenth century. In his approachable and informative study, Colin Burrow clarifies the genres and conventions at work in Spenser's poem. He explores the poet's taste for archaism and allegory, and the nature of epic and of heroism in The Faerie Queene. He presents Spenser as a 'Renaissance' poet who is drawn at once to images of vital rebirth and of mortal frailty. In clear, jargon-free prose he examines Spenser's equivocal relationship with his Queen and with the Irish landscape in which he spent his mature years. Spenser emerges from this book a less orthodox and harmonious poet than he is often thought to be, but as a complex, thoughtful, and attractive writer.