Exploring the Legacy of Edmund Spenser: Unveiling Fascinating Facts

Hello, today we are going to talk about Edmund Spencer. Edmund Spencer is one of the best known English poets from Elizabethan age. He was born in the year 1552 in England and he had so many privileges in his life like he had the friendship of Sir Philip Sidney who enjoyed courtly life who himself was a literary person and besides him Spencer also had other friends from the popular circles in the society. Spencer is known to have had a very good and creative style in his poetry writing as he is remembered for his Spenserian stanzas. He wrote stanzas with nine lines and this later became a form of stanza named after him and not just that he is also known for coining many English words like it is said that he's coined about 100 English words and also he had changed altered the spellings of existing words so he was very creative and he's also known for visual picturization of landscapes and other things. So his first work was the Shepard's Calendar which is well known and is divided into 12 eclogues. Now eclogue is a unit of poetry and it is divided into 12 eclogues where each eclogue is named after a month of calendar and then he has written the Fairy Queen which is his masterpiece the magnum opus. Fairy Queen as the title itself hints us is about the queen of fairyland and she is Gloriana. Now the interesting thing is that Spenser had Queen Elizabeth in mind when he was portraying the queen Gloriana in his Fairy Queen and Fairy Queen is divided into six books. I mean it's not divided it contains six books and it's about Prince Arthur or King Arthur who with his knights is on his rescue mission and each knight represents a virtue like chastity, friendship and all other virtues and one more interesting point about Fairy Queen is that it is written in approximately 35,000 lines and at the end of Fairy Queen Arthur and Gloriana they get married and when he was writing actually the preface for the same for the Fairy Queen can be traced in one of his letters to his friend Walter Rayleigh. So that is considered to be the preface for where he shares his idea and it is an allegorical poem and highly read and widely appreciated. Then came his other poems he has written many other minor poems and he has written amority. He has also written sonnets and this amority is the title given to the collection of his sonnets. There are I think 89 sonnets and it is said that these sonnets were written for his future wife Elizabeth Boyle since these sonnets are surcharged with the theme of love and this reminds me that Spencer also wrote wedding poems, wedding songs like Epithalamion, Prothalamion these. So Spencer was very good at portraying marriage and love and not just that besides poem he has also written a prose work view of the present state of Ireland where he advocates for the Irish people who were suppressed who lived in a suppressed state. So it is like a very forerunner what to call it like an advocacy for anti-colonialism. So he also wrote prose and his letters are also very famous and he also inspired other great poets like John Milton and I think these are the very important points about Spencer and if you would like to read more on him please visit my website. Thank you for listening in.