Massacre of foreign mercenaries at Smerwick.

INTRODUCTION: ‘OPPOSD REFLEXION’

Spenser is most commonly celebrated as the author of The Faerie Queene yet had he written nothing other than the works collected in the present volume he would still rank amongst the foremost of English poets. His shorter poems are arguably as essential to the comprehension of his epic verse as are the Eclogues and Georgics to Virgil’s Aeneid but, like their Virgilian counterparts, their primary importance lies in their intrinsic literary merit. They are no mere adjuncts to the epic project but integral components of a wider canon which acknowledges and explores both the strengths and limitations of the heroic outlook. Read in conjunction with, rather than in subordination to, The Faerie Queene they reveal the intellectual range and aesthetic diversity of a singularly complex and frequently dichotomous world view. To an even greater extent than the epic poetry they demonstrate Spenser’s generic and stylistic versatility, his remarkable linguistic virtuosity and mastery of complex metrical forms. Here he adopted the conflicting, if oddly complementary, personae of satirist and eulogist, elegist and lover, polemicist and prophet and, in the process, radically transformed the classical and medieval genres he employed. The impact upon succeeding generations of poets from Shakespeare to Yeats was tremendous. Originality, bred by tradition, fostered the renewal of tradition. Long before the term ‘Spenserian’ passed into common critical usage the concept was well understood and the practice widely imitated.

The publication of The Shepheardes Calender in 1579 marked a crucial turning point in English literary history. The ‘new Poete’ introduced to, and concealed from, the reading public, by the mysterious ‘E. K.’ – a literary agent too ideal to be other than fictitious – issued a manifesto for a new poetics premised upon an aggressive confidence in the English language, ‘which truely of it self is both ful enough for prose and stately enough for verse’. By appropriating to his yet anonymous cause the illustrious names of Virgil and Chaucer, he nominated himself as their successor, arrogantly proclaiming his talent even as he pretended to disclaim ‘vaunted titles’ and ‘glorious showes’. For the contemporary reader the shock of the new entailed a startling accommodation with the old. The Calender’s archaic diction articulated its claims to kinship with Chaucer by lending ‘great grace, and as one would say, auctoritie to the verse’.