Books by Edmund Spenser

aeo Provides the first ever student edition of this highly influential and, outside the library, otherwise unavailable text. aeo Represents a key critical intervention in the public sphere by a major canonical Renaissance poet. aeo Makes available a controversial and founding document in English colonial discourse.

Although he is most famous for The Faerie Queene, this volume demonstrates that for these poems alone Spenser should still be ranked as one of England's foremost poets.Spenser's shorter poems reveal his generic and stylistic versatility, his remarkable linguistic skill and his mastery of complex metrical forms.The range of this volume allows him to emerge fully in the varied and conflicting personae he adopted, as satirist and eulogist, elegist and lover, polemicist and prophet.The volume includes The Shepeardes Calender, Complaints, and A Theatre for Wordlings.

Born in London in 1552, Edmund Spenser was educated at Cambridge University, but lived most of his life in Ireland. As a poet, he enjoyed much fame during his lifetime. This collection represents not only "The Faerie Queene", but his love sonnets, wedding sonnets, and pastoral eclogues.

The Faerie Queene was the first epic in English and one of the most influential poems in the language for later poets from Milton to Tennyson. Dedicating his work to Elizabeth I, Spenser brilliantly united medieval romance and renaissance epic to expound the glory of the Virgin Queen. The poem recounts the quests of knights including Sir Guyon, Knight of Constance, who resists temptation, and Artegall, Knight of Justice, whose story alludes to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Composed as an overt moral and political allegory, The Faerie Queene, with its dramatic episodes of chivalry, pageantry and courtly love, is also a supreme work of atmosphere, colour and sensuous description.