Edmund spenser (1552-1599).

The first really commanding figure in the Elizabethan period, and one of the chief of all English poets, is Edmund Spenser. In 1579 Spenser published the collection of poems which is commonly taken as marking the beginning of the great Elizabethan literary period, namely «The Shepherd’s Calendar». This is a series of pastoral pieces twelve in number, artificially assigned one to each month in the year. The subjects are various – the conventionalized love of the poet for a certain Rosalind; current religious controversies in allegory; moral questions; the state of poetry in England; and the praises of Queen Elizabeth, whose almost incredible vanity exacted the most fulsome flattery from every writer who hoped to win a name at her court. The significance of «The Shepherd’s Calendar» lies partly in its genuine feeling for external Nature, which contrasts strongly with the hollow conventional phrases of the poetry of the previous decade, and especially in the vigor, the originality, and, in some of the eclogues, the beauty, of the language and of the varied verse. It was at once evident that here a real poet had appeared. An interesting innovation diversely judged at the time and since was Spenser’s deliberate employment of rustic and archaic words, especially of the Northern dialect, which he introduced partly because of their appropriateness to the imaginary characters, partly for the sake of freshness of expression. They, like other features of the work, point forward to the immortal «The Faerie Queene». The dedication of the work is to Queen Elizabeth, to whom, indeed, as its heroine, the poem pays perhaps the most splendid compliment ever offered to any human being in verse.

Spenser’s «Faerie Queene» is not only one of the longest but one of the greatest English poems; it is also very characteristically Elizabethan. The whole is a vast epic allegory, aiming, in the first place, to portray the virtues which make up the character of a perfect knight; an ideal embodiment, seen through Renaissance conceptions, of the best in the chivalrous system which in Spenser’s time had passed away, but to which some choice spirits still looked back with regretful admiration. As Spenser intended, twelve moral virtues of the individual character, such as Holiness and Temperance, were to be presented, each personified in the hero of one of twelve Books; and the crowning virtue, which Spenser, in Renaissance terms, called Magnificence, and which may be interpreted as Magnanimity, was to figure as Prince (King) Arthur, nominally the central hero of the whole poem, appearing and disappearing at frequent intervals. That the reader may never be in danger of forgetting his moral aim, Spenser fills the poem with moral observations, frequently setting them as guides at the beginning of the cantos.

No poem in the world is nobler than «The Faerie Queene» in atmosphere and entire effect. The poem is a romantically luxuriant wilderness of dreamily or languorously delightful visions, often rich with all the harmonies of form and motion and color and sound. His landscapes are usually of a rather vague, often of a vast nature. They are commonly great plains, wide and gloomy forests (where the trees of many climates often grow together in impossible harmony), cool caves – in general, lonely, quiet, or soothing scenes, but all unquestionable portions of a delightful fairyland. To him, it should be added, the sublime aspects of Nature were mainly dreadful; the ocean, for example, seemed to him a raging «waste of waters, wide and deep», a mysterious and insatiate devourer of the lives of men.

To the beauty of Spenser’s imagination, ideal and sensuous, corresponds his magnificent command of rhythm and of sound. As a verbal melodist, especially a melodist of sweetness and of stately grace, he is unsurpassable. Here, as in «The Shepherd’s Calendar», he deliberately introduces, especially from Chaucer, obsolete words and forms.