Edmund Spenser

• 1. Introduction

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  Edmund Spenser died in London on the 13th of January 1599, and according to Ben Jonson, he died "for want of bread". That claim was almost certainly false. Spenser had a payment authorised by the government and was owed his royal pension. Yet the detail stuck, because it captured something true about the man: a poet of extraordinary ambition whose relationship with power was always precarious. He had spent the last two decades of his life not in a London salon but on a confiscated estate in North Cork, writing the grandest poem in the English language from the edge of an empire that barely noticed him. How did a journeyman clothmaker's son from East Smithfield become the poet laureate of the Tudor age? And how did the man who wrote some of the most tender love poetry in the language also write one of the most chilling defences of colonial violence ever put to paper?

• 2. From London to Ireland

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  Spenser was born around 1552 in East Smithfield, London, the probable son of John Spenser, a journeyman clothmaker. His early education at the Merchant Taylors' School opened doors that his father's trade never could. He matriculated as a sizar at Pembroke College, Cambridge, meaning he worked for his keep, and there he forged a friendship with Gabriel Harvey that would last decades despite their sharp disagreements about poetry. After Cambridge he moved through a succession of secretarial posts. In 1578 he worked briefly for John Young, Bishop of Rochester. The following year he published The Shepheardes Calender and married his first wife, Machabyas Childe, with whom he had two children, Sylvanus and Katherine.

  In July 1580 everything changed. Spenser travelled to Ireland as secretary to Arthur Grey, the 14th Baron Grey de Wilton, newly appointed Lord Deputy. He served under Grey alongside Walter Raleigh at the siege of Smerwick, a violent confrontation that Spenser witnessed at close range. When Grey was recalled to England, Spenser stayed. Ireland would be his home for the rest of his life. He accumulated official posts and land through the Munster Plantation, acquiring his main estate at Kilcolman, near Doneraile in North Cork, sometime between 1587 and 1589. He later added a second holding at Rennie, on a rock above the river Blackwater. The ruins of that second property are still visible today. A tree near the site, known locally as "Spenser's Oak", stood until it was destroyed by lightning in the 1960s, and legend holds that he wrote parts of The Faerie Queene beneath its shade.

• 3. The Faerie Queene

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  The first three books of The Faerie Queene appeared in 1590 after Spenser travelled to London to publish and promote them, likely with Raleigh's help. The effort earned him a life pension of £50 a year from Queen Elizabeth I. It was a remarkable achievement for a man still living on a plantation estate in Cork. The second set of three books followed in 1596. Spenser originally planned twelve books in total, which means the poem as it exists is incomplete. Even so, it stands as one of the longest poems in the English language.

  In his own "Letter of the Authors", Spenser describes the work as "cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devises", and states that its aim was to "fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline". The poem operates on several layers of allegory simultaneously. Its knights embody specific virtues, and the whole structure can be read as a celebration of Elizabeth I. Raleigh, in a commendatory poem he contributed to the 1590 edition, claimed to admire and value Spenser's work more than any other in the English language. That endorsement from a man close to the Queen was not accidental. Spenser hoped the poem would secure him a permanent place at court. The plan misfired. His next major collection included Mother Hubberd's Tale, a satire that antagonised Lord Burghley, the Queen's principal secretary, and Spenser returned to Ireland without the court appointment he had sought.

• 4. The Shepheardes Calender and Shorter Poems

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  Spenser published The Shepheardes Calender in 1579 under the pseudonym "Immerito", meaning the unworthy one. The work emulates Virgil's Eclogues of the first century BCE and the Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus, a late medieval and early Renaissance poet. It organises twelve pastoral poems around the twelve months of the year. Each month stands alone as its own poem, though together they form a complete year. Editions from the late 16th and early 17th centuries included woodcuts for each month, giving the collection a faint resemblance to an emblem book.

  In the 1590s, Spenser produced a concentrated run of shorter poems, nearly all of them concerned with love or grief. In 1591 he published Complaints, a collection that speaks in mournful or mocking tones. By 1594 his first wife had died, and the following year he married Elizabeth Boyle, a relative of Richard Boyle, the 1st Earl of Cork. She was considerably younger than he was. The eighty-nine sonnets of Amoretti record his courtship of her, using subtle humour and parody while reshaping the Petrarchan tradition. Epithalamion celebrated their wedding. Both works also carry an undercurrent of unease that some have connected to Spenser's anxiety over his inability to complete The Faerie Queene. In 1596 he published Prothalamion, a wedding song written for the daughters of a duke, reportedly to seek favour at court. His son with Elizabeth Boyle was named Peregrine.

• 5. A Craftsman of Verse

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  Spenser invented a stanza form used across The Faerie Queene that now bears his name. The Spenserian stanza runs in iambic pentameter for eight lines and closes with a longer line in iambic hexameter, a format called an Alexandrine, with six metrical feet. He also devised his own rhyme scheme for the sonnet, in which the final line of each quatrain links to the opening line of the next, creating an interlocking chain unlike the Italian or Shakespearean forms.

  The language of his poems is deliberately archaic. Spenser looked back to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and to Petrarch's Il Canzoniere as models of a kind of elevated poetic diction. The effect was conscious. Scholars have noted that although he studied Virgil and Ovid closely at school, his work diverges sharply from theirs. His individuality may have come partly from an imperfect grasp of the classical texts, but also from a genuine creative ambition to fashion something new from old materials. John Milton, writing in Areopagitica, called him "our sage and serious poet Spenser", and said he dared think Spenser a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas. Charles Lamb later called him "the Poet's Poet". Admirers ranged from William Blake and William Wordsworth to John Keats, Lord Byron, and Alfred Tennyson. Alexander Pope, in the 18th century, compared his admiration for Spenser to loving a mistress whose faults one sees but accepts.

• 6. Ireland, Violence, and the View

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  In 1596 Spenser completed A View of the Present State of Irelande, a prose pamphlet in the form of a dialogue. It circulated in manuscript during his lifetime and was not published until the mid-17th century, most probably because its content was too inflammatory to print. The pamphlet argues that Ireland could never be fully brought under English control unless its language and customs were destroyed, by force if necessary.

  Spenser organised his analysis around three categories of what he called Irish "evils": laws, customs, and religion. The Brehon law system, which operated its own courts independently of the Crown, drew particular criticism. He found the Brehon practice of settling murders by imposing a fine on the murderer's family deeply objectionable, preferring capital punishment. His most chilling passage describes a scorched earth campaign from the Second Desmond Rebellion, in which he observed starving survivors "creepinge forth upon theire handes" from the woods and glens, eating water-cresses and shamrocks, scraping carcasses from graves. He cited this horror not as an indictment of the policy but as evidence of its effectiveness.

  His warning about the Irish language was explicit: "Soe that the speach being Irish, the hart must needes be Irishe; for out of the aboundance of the hart, the tonge speaketh". The pamphlet is partly a defence of Lord Grey de Wilton, under whom Spenser had served since 1580 and whose thinking on Ireland had shaped Spenser's own. In 1598, during the Nine Years' War, Hugh O'Neill's forces drove Spenser from Kilcolman. His castle was burned. Ben Jonson claimed that one of Spenser's infant children died in the fire.

• 7. Legacy

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  When Spenser's body was carried to Westminster Abbey in 1599, other poets bore his coffin and threw pens and pieces of their own poetry into his grave. The burial site was placed deliberately near Geoffrey Chaucer's, in what became Poets' Corner. That gesture, chosen by his fellow poets, said something the obituaries did not: that the literary world understood the scale of what it had lost.

  In 1591, Spenser had published a verse translation of Joachim Du Bellay's Les Antiquités de Rome, a sonnet sequence that Du Bellay had first published in 1558. Spenser's version, titled Ruines of Rome: by Bellay, may also draw on Latin poems on the same subject by Jean Vitalis, published in 1576. The translation is one marker of Spenser's sustained engagement with Continental literary culture, which ran alongside his deep roots in English and classical tradition.

  Washington University in St. Louis, with a large grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, has supported the creation of a digital archive of the first publication of Spenser's collected works in a century. The project, led by professor Joseph Lowenstein with the help of undergraduate students, centres at Washington University with support from other American colleges. The 1611 first folio of Spenser's collected works had been the previous landmark edition; the digital archive marks the next step in making that inheritance accessible.