In 1599, he moved back to London, where he died in distressed circumstances, at age 46.Į. He may have lost his wife and children in that attack, and he certainly lost his status in the colony. Spenser’s castle was burned down by Irish rebels in 1598. Subsequently, his life was marked by disappointment.ĭ. Spenser had ambitions to advance his career at court and, with that in mind, conceived The Faerie Queene. The poem won him a small pension but not the great favors he craved. He outlined his authoritarian views on governing the Irish in pamphlets and, as a reward for his services, was given an Irish estate.Ĭ. His job there was to enforce martial law and root out sedition and rebellion. As a young man, Spenser was an assistant to the provincial governor in Ireland. Spenser was the son of a prosperous cloth-maker and was educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School and at Pembroke College, Cambridge.ī. His pen was not his main source of income in life, and it was not his main ambition in life to be a writer.Ī.
Spenser was not a professional writer no one will be able to claim that description until many years later. Along with its stature as a great poem, Spenser’s work is a literary gesture of devotion to the court, as we see in its dedication. The English honor system runs throughout England to this day but was at its most dynamic during the reign of Elizabeth I and received its finest literary celebration in The Faerie Queene.Ģ. Spenser (1552–1599) was a courtier, a soldier, a political player, and a poet, and the values that formed his sense of a civilized society descended hierarchically from the fount of England’s honor, the queen.ġ. The Faerie Queene is dedicated to the monarch who inherited a reformed England and who, during her 45-year reign (1558–1603), transformed a small northern island into a world power.ĭ. This discussion brings us to Edmund Spenser’s magnum opus, The Faerie Queene, arguably the greatest poem composed during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Literature defines the core values on which a civilization founds itself.Ĭ. If literature can corrupt, it can also civilize or at least contribute to the civilizing process by articulating the elements that hold a society together. Exactly which works of literature are corrupting has been much disputed throughout the centuries Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a work that has been both censored and prescribed at different times.ī. Literature has many functions: It can entertain, educate, and even corrupt us.Ī. Spenser was also an innovator in poetic diction and left a legacy of elevated, ornamented language to poets who would follow him for the next 500 years. We’ll explore the “big three” literary devices-allegory, irony, and ambiguity-that help us understand English literature. The subject of the poem is England itself, and it embodies the moral virtues of the nation in a band of knightly heroes.
Spenser was a courtier and politician who wrote this poem as a literary gesture of devotion to the court.
We can perhaps point to no greater example of literature that fulfills this function than Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Scope: Literature can be a corrupting or a civilizing influence on society in its civilizing function, it articulates the elements and core values that hold a society together.