2019-05-08 - 草稿

Edmurd Spenser was born in Lodon,he received great education first at Merchant Taylor's school and then at Pembroke College,Cambridge.He was recognized as the "Poet's poet" by his contemporaries and had a great influence on a number of great English poets in the later centuries,including Milton,Keats,etc.He invented Sepenserian stanza,which became a popular verse form in the historical development of English poetry.His works included The Faerie Queene,The Shepherd's Calender and Amoretti.

The Faerie Queene,set in the mythical world of King Arthur and his knights,is the greatest work of Spenser,each book has a hero knight who performs noble deeds for a fairy queen whom Spenser intentionally associates with Queen Elizabeth.The knight in each book represents a different moral virtue :justice,courtesy and so on. Though cast in the mould of medieval chivalric romance and allegory,the Faerie Queene is the first national epic of England in the age of the Renaissance.It expresses the poet's patriotic feelings of national greatness and voices the moral ideals of the English aristocracy as embodied in the noble,virtuous and brave Knight Arthur.

The shepherd's calendars was the most important work of Sepenser,which was built by 12 eclogues,each of which symbolize a month of a year and written in different meters,this work was adopted the form of dialogue between shepherds except the first and the last,theme of love is its main expression,the 4th being a  panegyic for queen Elizabeth.The more significant are those in which the poet either attack the loose living and abuses of Catholic prelates and the worldliness of the Anglican clergy.The 10th is the climatic one,which concern about the poetry of contemporary time and the responsibility of the poets.

Amorreti is a series of 88 sonnets in which the poet record the course of his wooing of Elizabeth Boyle,a woman he married with.In all these sonnets except the 8th which adopt the shakespearian kind,Sepenser adopted his own Sepenserian stanza of special form of linked quatrains rhyming ababbcbccdcdee.Though poet express his genuine sentiments,yet these poems were marred by the influence of Platonism and of religious and mythical concepts of love,so that they sound conventional and flat.