Contributions
Born in London to a family of modest means, educated at the Merchant Taylors' School and then at Cambridge, Edmund Spenser became the most ambitious poet of the Elizabethan age. He announced himself in 1579 with The Shepheardes Calender, a sequence of twelve pastoral eclogues shaped to the months of the year, which renewed the English poetic language. His masterwork is The Faerie Queene (1590-1596), a vast allegorical epic to the glory of Elizabeth I, in which each book embodies a virtue — holiness, temperance, chastity, justice — through the adventures of its knights. To carry it, Spenser devised a nine-line stanza, the "Spenserian stanza," which remains one of the major forms of English poetry. He also wrote the love sequence Amoretti and the Epithalamion, a sumptuous marriage poem for his own wedding, along with elegies and prose tracts. A crown official in Ireland, he pursued a colonial career and a poetic vocation at once.
Significance
Spenser gave English its first great national epic and proved that the vernacular could rival Homer, Virgil and Ariosto. His ambition — to forge a total poem, moral, political and musical — and his invention of the Spenserian stanza made him "the poet's poet": Milton, Keats, Shelley and Tennyson would all claim him as a master. His deliberately archaic diction conjures a faerie world, an ideal of formal beauty that carries across the centuries. But the man had a harsher side, often passed over. A zealous colonist of the kingdom of Ireland and beneficiary of lands confiscated in Munster, he wrote a prose treatise, A View of the Present State of Ireland, urging measures of extreme severity to subdue the Gaelic population — famine among them. The singer of virtue and courtesy was also a cog of conquest, and the splendour of his allegory is doubled by an uncompromising imperial ideology. That contrast makes him a figure modern criticism rereads without indulgence.
Influence
Father of the English epic and inventor of the Spenserian stanza, he lastingly shaped Britain's high poetry: Milton claimed him, the Romantics (Keats, Shelley, and Byron, who adopted his stanza) revered him, and Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites drew on his faerie imagination. He fixed the idea of an ambitious national poetry in the common tongue. He himself inherited Virgil and Ovid, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Tasso for chivalric epic, the pastoral of Theocritus, and Chaucer, whom he revered as his English model; Neoplatonism and Elizabethan Protestantism fed his allegory of the virtues.
Anecdote
In October 1598 Tyrone's rebellion set the south of Ireland ablaze: the rebels burned Kilcolman Castle, where Spenser had settled on confiscated land. The poet fled to England, ruined, and died at Westminster a few weeks later, in January 1599, in destitution — Ben Jonson would even claim he died "for lack of bread." He was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to Chaucer, the master he had chosen for himself: so began what would become Poets' Corner. Tradition holds that London's poets followed the coffin and threw into the grave their manuscript elegies and the pens that had written them.