Nine Lives (of the Poets): Spenser!

Our book today is most likely called Edmund Spenser: A Life, and, as the hilarious critic-speak malapropism goes, it fills a much-needed void. It's a fully-researched, lustrously energetic, beautifully crafted (deckle edge, dozens of spot illustrations, flourished margins), and unapologetically literate full-dress biography of Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599), the great Elizabethan poet.

There's ample material for such a biography. Spenser was born in London and educated first at the Merchant Taylor's School (where the grants of money he received instilled in him both an appreciation for simple kindness and an appreciation of the material dimensions of humanism that he'd carry with him - in one problematic way or another - for the rest of his life) and at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he made the acquaintance not only of several of his future employers but also of Gabriel Harvey, the scholar and litterateur who first fanned Spenser's own literary gifts to life. Harvey was a bit prone to pomposity and had only mediocre literary talents himself (neither of these things was forgivable by a scalding wit like Nashe, but they don't in themselves condemn a man, after all - he was an oddity even by the standards of his very odd time, and he richly deserves a rattling good biography of his own), but the field of literature is forever in his debt, for giving us Spenser. The two collaborated on a series of public letters about the state of English poetry, and Harvey is the guiding animus in Spenser's first major work, The Shepheardes Calendar, which was published in 1579 to an acclaim - a kind of acclaim - no previous work in English had ever received. Instantly it was seen that an epoch had begun.(To be fair, Spenser considerably helped that perception along by 'annotating' his own poem-sequence under the pseudonym E. K.) It had been two centuries since Chaucer, and in that time England had come into her own as a country and an identity and had begun to yearn, Augustan Rome-style, for its own literature, for the sense that its own literature was possible.

The Shepheardes Calendar is dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. In all likelihood, Spenser had met the younger poet-courtier the year before while serving briefly in the household of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, who was Sidney's uncle. In 1580, Spenser went to Ireland as Secretary to Lord Grey De Wilton, who'd been appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland, and it was in Ireland that Spenser was to spend most of his time and make most of his fortune, eventually becoming master of Kilcolman, an estate in County Cork. It was in Ireland that he would meet and marry the lovely Elizabeth Boyle (and it's Elizabeth Boyle he would celebrate in his gorgeous Amoretti and Epithalamion), and it was from Ireland that he would always look with longing toward the court of Elizabeth I in London.

It was to flatter (and guardedly, fashionably chastise) this court that Spenser crafted the first three books of his masterpiece, The Faerie Queene, an extended allegory and a heartfelt act of homage to Spenser's beloved Chaucer. Our big, beautiful biography would owe a good part of its length to the fact that it would have to grapple with The Faerie Queene, a work that's longer than War and Peace (and Spenser, like Chaucer with his own masterpiece, planned for it to be four times as long) and more easily misunderstood than the Bible. It's safe to say The Faerie Queene is the single greatest work of English literature absolutely nobody reads anymore, and our biographer would not only have to explain why that is but also correct it - no mean feat.

Spenser travelled to London in 1589 (in the company of his County Cork neighbor, Sir Walter Ralegh) to present those first three books of The Faerie Queene to their exemplar, Queen Elizabeth I, and although she was appreciative (measuredly so - she never had the temperament for extended allegories - ironically enough, considering the fact that she fashioned her entire life into one) and pledged Spenser a fairly decent pension, her chief councillor, Lord Burghley, disliked the poet and successfully scuppered his future at court. Spenser returned to Ireland, married, and kept writing. By 1596 he had a gigantic amount of new work done, including the next three books of The Faerie Queene and a bit of literary payback for Burghley in Mother Hubberds Tale. There was a great deal of verse besides this, and copious letters, and a pile of Irish documents (indeed, a vast amount of good work on Spenser awaits our biographer in Ireland alone) - our poet was a busy man, a contented man who was nevertheless convinced he was not as happy as he would have been living a different life, a glorious courtier's life like the one being enacted by his friend Sidney. Our biography will necessarily deal with the ugly sin of ambition.

In 1598 it all came crashing down. Tyrone's rebellion reached Spenser's castle, ransacked and burned it, and Spenser fled, eventually all the way to London, to the tender mercies of the court that had spurned him. Our present biography will perforce have much to say on the subject of the English occupation of Ireland and Spenser's place in that story. The poet's A View of the Present State of Ireland is by any reckoning a vile and provoking document (it was published posthumously), and our biographer will need to take account of it - the more arresting and original the account, the better.

Spenser died in London in 1599 - 'for lack of bread,' as Ben Jonson famously lied.  He was buried in Westminster Abbey (hard by Chaucer, fittingly enough), and his fellow poets tossed verses and pens into the grave before it was closed.

They hailed Spenser as "the Prince of Poets" (our biographer at the last minute will very wisely choose not to make that the title of the biography), and that praise only grew stronger in the following decades and centuries. Dryden ranked his pastorals among the finest of their kind ever written, and Pope echoed and amplified that verdict. In 1875 the great, much-missed James Russell Lowell wrote a typically learned and magisterial essay on Spenser, according him that highest of all Boston Brahmin compliments, being capable:

We can trace in Spenser's poems the gradual growth of his taste through experiment and failure to that assured self-confidence which indicates that he had at length found out the true bent of his genius , - that happiest of discoveries (and not so easy as it might seem) which puts a man in undisturbed possession of his own individuality.

"Before his time," Lowell writes, "the boundary between poetry and prose had not been clearly defined. His great merit lies not only in the ideal treatment with which he glorified common things and gilded them with a ray of enthusiasm, but far more in the ideal point of view which he first revealed to his countrymen." "His natural tendency," Lowell continues, "is to shun whatever is sharp and abrupt. He loves to prolong emotion, and lingers in his honeyed sensations like a bee in the translucent cup of a lily."

Our biographer would also be well advised to study the 1909 essay on Spenser by J. W. Mackail, who sets a stern warning early in the piece:

The fatal tendency of classicism is to see life through books, and to take it at second hand. Its natural instinct is to copy, and in doing so, to copy the inferior classics, who are more copiable, and then to go on copying itself.

Mackail strikes a generally elegiac tone throughout his essay:

Thus Spenser, like so many other great poets, represents the late splendour of a descending and fast disappearing tradition. The realm in which he was so great an innovator, so wide an explorer and conqueror, was even before his death passing into other hands.

But even so, Mackail is heartfelt in his praise, as discusses the Epithalamion: "For sustained beauty of execution, for melodiousness in which the most melodious of English poets excels even his own standard, for richness of ornament that stops just short of excess, and does not either blur the outline or clog the movement, it easily takes the first place, not only among Spenser's own lyrics, but among all English odes."

Edmund Spenser: A Life will draw on a vast array of sources, including many previously either unknown or underexamined; it will make such spirited and sharp-minded use of the vast corpus of Elizabethan literature that readers will feel as though they're sitting in the very taverns and ale houses, listening to a mighty new age shape its literary responses to itself. But the book won't owe its enormous general popularity and critical praise to its research, nor to its extensive bibliography, no - this book will be bought and read and talked about and treasured and revered and reprinted because it will have that perfect combination of acumen and dramatic assurance that so few biographies managed to achieve. It will go on the same shelf as Caro's The Power Broker or Bate's Samuel Johnson or Milford's Zelda or Bainton's Here I Stand - a great biography of its subject, yes, but also a great book in its own right.

Edmund Spenser: A Life hasn't been written yet. I've been waiting patiently for a very long time, and I'll continue waiting. Anybody out there who's game for giving it a try has my enthusiastic encouragement.

Norton Critical Editions!

Our ongoing feature of highlighting certain series of books must surely include Norton Critical Editions published for lo, these many decades by W.W. Norton. These books, as many of you will know, revolve around an idea of inspired simplicity: why not bring out editions of classic works that present those works in context? Not just a windy, aphoristic Introduction, but actual give-and-take, the specific details of a book's original setting, and some indication of its continued place in the stream of ideas.

In other words (even repulsive, industry-jargon words), it's reception.

In the long decades before the Norton Critical Editions showed up, eager readers (and mournful students) seeking to know such contextual details had to spend hours in the library, swinging from one secondary reference to the next like gibbons, always wondering if they were seeing everything - or even a fair representation of everything. Annotated editions of key texts were commercially available, and sometimes so were author- or book-specific collections of essays, but never the two in the place (yours truly well remembers the headache of hunting for those two separate things regarding Milton, one bitterly cold winter in Providence, many moons ago).

The Norton Critical Editions, largely filling that void, are therefore something like a shelf-full of miracles. Here you get a good solid edition of whatever primary-source work of literature you want (a huge variety is spanned, from Homer to Shakespeare to Wordsworth), plus a painstaking selection of contemporary responses to that work (where they're available), generous footnotes, and best of all, a collection of modern essays responding to the work.

The combination of all these things serves to situate the book in its own traditions better than anything short of a university lecture-course. Here you get not only War and Peace (in George Gibian's remarkably good revision of the classic Maude translation), which is all that most other editions even attempt, but you also get a helpful smattering of Russian critics from Tolstoy's era on, as when Tolstoy's correspondent Nikolai Strakhov wrote:

The picture of human life is complete.
The picture of the Russian of those days is complete.
The picture of what we call history an the struggle of nations is complete.
The picture of everything that people consider to be their happiness and greatness, their sorrow and their humiliation, is complete. This is what War and Peace is.

And can anybody doubt which killjoy wrote this?

Tolstoy is ridiculous as a prophet who has discovered new recipes for the salvation of mankind - and therefore the foreign and Russian "Tolstoyans" who desire to transform what is actually the weakest aspect of his teaching into a dogma are absolutely contemptible.

Yep - V.I. Lenin, take a bow!


Of course, it's possible to predict that the gathering of later scholarly reactions to any work would be unimaginably tedious, literary scholars being perpetrators of some of the densest, least-rewarding prose in the history of mankind. And lawd knows, sometimes this prediction is spot-on, such as when David Spitz gets going about John Stuart Mill's ultra-cerebral On Liberty:

Mill does not say that freedom of expression is of the same importance as freedom of thought; he says it is almost as important. He does not rest its defense on the same reasons; he would defend it in great part on the same reasons. He does not say that freedom of expression is identical to or inseparable from freedom of thought; he says only that it is practically inseparable from it.

Yeesh. Nobody's saying that Spitz is a hair-splitting old windbag; only that he's almost certainly a hair-splitting old windbag.

But all is not obfuscation! Academic discourse can be scintillating (it should always be so, but then, what school of writing has only worthies in its ranks?), and when the editor of a particular Norton Critical volume picks the right modern academics - and the right parts of their works - the result can often be a collection of writing that's just plain exciting.


'Exciting' isn't a word most of you would associate with Tennyson, for instance, but read a little of the great Arthur Carr on that Victorian master-poet, about whom Auden famously said, "there was little about melancholia that he didn't know; there was little else that he did":

In the presence of such a figure it is no wonder that critics who are also poets grow nervous and exasperated. They see in Tennyson not an open but a covert capitulation, perhaps involuntary though not altogether unconscious. Yet he is our true precursor. He shows and hides, as if in embryo, a master theme of Joyce's Ulysses - the accentuated and moody self-consciousness and the sense of loss that mark Stephen Dedalus. He forecasts Yeats' interest in the private myth. He apprehended in advance of Aldous Huxley the uses of mysticism to castigate materialistic culture. And in Maud, at least, he prepared the way for the verse of Eliot's 'Preludes' and 'Prufrock.'

If a pronouncement like that doesn't make even the most complacent poetry faddist rethink Tennyson a little, nothing will. The chief glory of the Norton Critical Editions is that so many of them contain so many such revelations, all gathered together for your convenience. Take Edmund Spenser, for example: he's unknown outside of academia today, his great works unread by the general public and only very reluctantly read by yoked and grudging students - and yet he's leapingly great, lightning flashing in a clear sky, and Hugh Maclean, in his Norton edition of Spenser, pulls together a collection of scholars of such easy learning and clear readability that even faddists might be in danger of having their minds opened a little, as when Douglas Bush says:

The Elizabethans, despite their generally superior knowledge of Latin and sometimes Greek authors, were very often content, like their medieval predecessors, to gather their mythological nosegays from the nearest conservatory.

Or when the great academic Northrop Frye gives a characteristic twist to interpreting Spenser's greatest work:

Private and public education, then, are the central themes of The Faerie Queene. If we had to find a single word for the virtue underlying all private education, the best word would perhaps be fidelity: that unswerving loyalty to an ideal which is virtue, to a single lady which is love, and to the demands of one's calling which is courage.


The collected Norton Critical Editions form a very large and varied library: there are great volumes on Darwin, Newton, Erasmus, Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Lord Byron, the pig Martin Luther, Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, Boccaccio, on myths and currents of philosophy, and even on little-known and rightly-ignored minor female authors. And the series is ongoing, constantly refining, supplementing, and enlarging a catalog that's already a wonder of the literary world. Nobody needs to have all of these volumes, but everybody with a favorite author or time period from the Western Canon should have the pertinent volumes, because every specialization has to have a starting-point, and there's no better starting-point for a work of literature than a Norton Critical Edition devoted to it.