Contents

1. Biography .............................................................................................................................. 2
2. The Spenserian stanza: .......................................................................................................... 2
2.1 Works .................................................................................................................................. 4
a) The Faerie Queene ............................................................................................................ 4
b) The Shepheardes Calender ................................................................................................ 4
3. Spenserian sonnet .................................................................................................................. 6
 1. Biography

Edmund Spenser was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem
and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognized
as one of the first craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, and one of the greatest
poets in the English language.
Edmund Spenser was born in East Smithfield, London around the year 1552 though there
is some ambiguity as to the exact date of his birth. As a young boy, he was educated in
London at the Merchant Taylors' School and matriculated as a sizar at Pembroke College,
Cambridge. While at Cambridge he became a friend of Gabriel Harvey, and later
consulted him, despite their differing views on poetry.
He had an astonishing control of the poets craft; Edmund Spenser is often called the
poets poet. He himself invented a poetic form called the Spenserian stanza, which was
widely imitated by poets in later times- Byron, Sheller, Keats, and Burns. Spenser was
also one of the most fanciful of all poets in England. Unlike Shakespeare, who lived at
the same time, but had a realistic view of the world, he has more concerned with a dream
world of knights and dragons than with the problems mixed emotions of real human
beings. He created pictures of a fairy world in which characters move as symbols of noble
ideals.
Spenser, the son of a London clothmaker, attended school on a scholarship set up for poor
boys. While still a student, he became adept at translating and introducing classical meters
into English poetry. Shortly after taking degrees from Cambridge University, he
published The Shepherds Calendar, which consists of twelve descriptive poems, one for
each month, about the beauties of the countryside. This series won Spenser court
recognition and began the vogue for pastoral poetry.
Encouraged by Sir Walter Raleigh, a court favourite, Spenser next wrote his greatest
work, The Faerie Queene, which is, incidentally, the longest poem in the English
language. It is not as long as Spenser originally intended it to be, however. He set out to
write twelve books, each recounting the story of a knight who personifies one of the
virtues of a perfect gentleman.

2. The Spenserian stanza:

Edmund Spenser devised the Spenserian stanza for his great work The Faerie Queene
(1590). The stanza consists of eight lines of iambic pentameter followed by a single
alexandrine, a twelve-syllable iambic line. The final line typically has a caesura, or break,
after the first three feet. The rhyme scheme of these lines is "ababbcbcc.
A perfect example of the form is (as one might expect) the first stanza of Book I of The
Faerie Queene:
A gentle knight was pricking on the plaine,
Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine,
 The cruell markes of many a bloody fielde;
Yet armes till that time did he never wield:
His angry steede did chide his foaming bitt,
As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:
Full jolly knight he seemed, and faire did sitt,
As one for knightly jousts and fierce encounters fitt.
Critics note several earlier stanza forms as the basis for the Spenserian stanza. One widely
cited source is the ottava rima. This is an Italian form that originated in thirteenth-century
religious and minstrel poetry and consists of eight lines of iambic pentameter with the
rhyme scheme "abababcc." A relatively modern use of the ottava rima can be found in
Byron's Don Juan. Another possible source for Spenser's stanza is the "rhyme royal," a
stanza of seven lines of iambic pentameter that rhymes "ababbcc." Chaucer invented this
in his "Complaint unto Pity" and Shakespeare later used it in The Rape of Lucrece. But
regardless of its sources, the Spenserian stanza is regarded as "one of the most remarkably
original metric innovations in the history of English verse" (Preminger 807).
The Spenserian stanza fell into a period of disuse in the seventeenth century, but it
experienced a resurgence with Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Keats's "The Eve of
St. Agnes," and Shelley's "The Revolt of Islam" and "Adonais." Shelley is perhaps the
greatest master of the Spenserian stanza after Spenser himself. His grasp of the form is
quite notable in this, the third stanza from "Adonais":
Oh weep for Adonais-he is dead!
Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep!
Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed
Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep,
Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep;
For he is gone where all things wise and fair
Descend. Oh dream not that the amorous deep
Will yet restore him to the vital air;
Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair .
Following this resurgence in the period of English Romanticism, the Spenserian stanza
fell into disuse again in the mid-nineteenth century. A twentieth-century example of the
Spenserian stanza is in the "Dieper Levensinkijk" by Dutch poet Willem Kloos; this is a
rare example of the form written in a language other than English.

Possible influences
Spenser's invention may have been influenced by the Italian form ottava rima, which
consists of eight lines of iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme "abababcc." This
form was used by Spenser's Italian role models Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso.
Another possible influence is rhyme royal, a traditional medieval form used by
Geoffrey Chaucer and others, which has seven lines of iambic pentameter that rhyme
"ababbcc." More likely, however, is the eight-line ballad stanza with the rhyme
scheme "ababbcbc," which Chaucer used in his Monk's Tale. Spenser would have
been familiar with this rhyme scheme and simply added a line to the stanza, forming
"ababbcbcc.

2.1 Works

a) The Faerie Queene

The Faerie Queene is an incomplete English epic poem by Edmund Spenser. The
first half was published in 1590 and a second installment in 1596. The Faerie
Queene is notable for its form: it is one of the longest poems in the English
language and the origin of a verse form that came to be known as Spenserian
stanza.
It tells the stories of several knights, each representing a particular virtue, on their
quests for the Faerie Queene, Gloriana.
Redcrosse is the knight of Holiness, and must defeat both theological Error and
the dragon of deception to free the parents of Una ("truth"), his future wife. Guyon
is the knight of Temperance, who must destroy the fleshly temptations of Acrasia's
Bower of Bliss. Britomart, a woman in disguise as a male knight, represents
Chastity; she must find her beloved and win his heart. Artegall, the knight of
Justice, must rescue the lady Eirene from an unjust bondage. Cambell and
Triamond, the knights of Friendship, must aid one another in defense of various
ladies' honor. Finally, Calidore, the knight of Courtesy, must stop the Blatant
Beast from spreading its slanderous venom throughout the realm.
Each quest is an allegory, and the knight given the quest represents a person's
internal growth in that particular virtue. Such growth happens through various
trials, some of which the knights fail, showing how personal development is a
struggle requiring the aid of other forces and virtues to make it complete.

b) The Shepheardes Calender

It was published in 1579. Spenser signed himself as Immerito, thats why the
volume must have had a certain attraction of mysteriousness. It was styled by the
author of the commentary the new poet. This other signed himself E. K. The
secret seems to have been well enough kept. At court, perhaps, or at Cambridge,
it would be penetrated in time by a few, but generally, and at least as a matter of
form, the anonymity was acknowledged for a full decade to come. Spensers main
share in the work was confessed when the Faery Queen came out in 1590.
The Shepheardes Calender is a poem that consists of twelve eclogues about the
love-story of Rosalinde and Colin Clout. Each eclogue (a short pastoral poem that
is in the form of a dialogue or soliloquy) is named after a different month, which
represents the tirning of seasons that gives the appearance of dramatic continuity.
 Some Eclogues.
i. January: is to some extent an introduction to the whole sequence. It tells us all we
need to know about Colin, Rosalind and Hobbinol. Colin, forlorn and rejected by
his beloved Rosalind, compares his mood with the wintry landscape

ii. February. An impudent young shepherd, Cuddie, complains of the wintry blasts
to the elderly Thenot, and he scorns the old mans philosophical view that one
must learn to endure the long succession of misfortunes that this world brings and
be concerned only with the safety of the flock. Tired of Cuddies rudeness, Thenot
tells the fable of an old oak and a proud briar bush. The briar persuades a farmer
to cut down the tree to show off its own beauty. All is well until winter comes; the
briar then dies without the protection of the oak against wind and frost. Cuddie is
unmoved by this parable of youth and age and breaks it off abruptly.

iii. April: Thenot finds Hobbinol grieving over the sorrows of his friend Colin Clout
and mourning that Colins unrequited love deprived all the shepherds of his
poems. Thenot asks Hobbinol to recite one of Colins verses to while away the
hours as their flocks graze, and he complies with an ode on Fair Elisa, queen of
shepherds all. Colin calls upon the muses, the graces, the sun, and the moon as
he begins his praise of the daughter of Pan, the shepherds god, and Syrinx. Then
Colin describes Elisas beauty.

iv. June: Rosalind appears as a metaphorical Circe who enervates Colin's poetic
power. Hobbinol urges him and described Rosalind as 'the winding witche', who
bewitches Colin."
Thats how Hobbinol is advising Colin to try a change of scene. If the "winding witche"
symbolizes Rosalind then it ought to be in the place that Colin is advised to flee from,
and not in the place that he is advised to flee to.
v. September: The poem takes place late in the day, and a windy day too. The two
speakers take a while before they reach an accord. Diggon is bitter, he is
politicized in an embarrassing way. Hobbinol is portrayed as a timorous,
conventional stay-at-home who at first does not understand the sharp discourse of
Diggon, and when he does understand it is afraid of such plain speaking. But they
gradually come together through the fable. After automatically lamenting his
inability to offer any real help, Hobbinol is able to produce a resolution by offering
Diggon a bed to sleep on.
vi. December: it mentions death in the sense that the fiction comes to an end with the
poem. The only thing thats really going to die, we suspect, is Colins attachment
to Rosalind.
The years cycle, from spring to winter, is used as a figure, both of Colins love affair
(innocence, passion, waste, decay) and of his whole life (youth, manhood, ripeness, age).
He is actually singing the song in December, which is imagined both as a long-distant
spring and as the present onset of winter. A similar complication applies to summer, when
his fatal passion has overpowered and alienated him, yet at the same time his skills and
achievements continue to expand. But Colins knowledge will only result in making him
more capable of autumnally reckoning his own failure.
 3. Spenserian sonnet

When most of us hear the word 'sonnet,' the name Shakespeare likely comes to mind. But
Shakespeare was not the only writer of sonnets, Edmund Spenser, a contemporary of
Shakespeare, innovated the form even further and the resulting poetry has been called the
Spenserian sonnet ever since.
Form of the Spenserian sonnet: Like other sonnets, Spenser's contain fourteen lines of
iambic pentameter, meaning there are five iambic feet, or iambs, per line. However, his
rhyme scheme and the manner in which he decided to divide these lines distinguish his
form from the others.
The scheme Spenser chose was adapted from the rhyme model he used in his famous epic
poem The Faerie Queen and follows the pattern 'abab bcbc cdcd ee.' Here we have the
sonnet divided into three quatrains, or segments of four lines, followed by a rhyming
couplet. Spenser's form is also commonly referred to as a linking sonnet because the 'b'
and 'c' rhyme elements weave the quatrains together.
Let's take a quick look at an example of a Spenserian sonnet so we can see this formatting
in action. This is the sonnet 75 from Amoretti. The first line is broken into the 4 iambs
and the second syllable of each is stressed.
In this example, you can see how Spenser links the idea of each quatrain into a
continuous thought, which he reflects in the rhyme scheme. We also find that the final
couplet, once again distinguished by elements of rhyme, characteristically presents a
different idea from the rest of the sonnet or comments on it in some way. Now that
we've seen the framework of a Spenserian sonnet, you'll be able to take in the whole
picture in the following examples.