Better Know a Poet #1.1: Edmund Spenser

[angevin2]

So here is the first in my series of posts about Elizabethan poets. This was a tricky one to start off with, since there was a lot of research involved: I'm not really a Spenserian; I just pretend to know about him on lj. Probably there are people reading this who know a lot more about Spenser than I do (and, I mean, I am a recovering Spenserphobe

Comments

[lnhammer]

And of course Spenser appropriated the Colin Clout persona from Skelton -- who was best known at the time for his political satires of the court of Hal VIII.

---L.

[angevin2]

Indeed! Skelton is awesome -- I almost put him in the poll, but he was so much earlier than everybody else mentioned that I didn't...

[dolique]

I love you, by the way.

One (1) snarky comment:

"they hung out and philosophized about poetry, and whatnot" -- so that's what they're calling it these days!

Two (2) typos (and if this is obnoxious feel free to ignore me; it's just that you're generally the epitome of reliability when it comes to spelling, so it seemed a pity to let you lose the title):

"the poetry in The Shepheardes Calendar, in which [there are? Maybe? In any case, some sort of verb] various shepherds with names like Hobbinoll and Cuddy... and Colin Cloute

[angevin2]

Ah, thanks. I neglected to finish that one paragraph and then forgot that I was going to come back and finish it. D'oh. I am glad you're enjoying this, though! :D

Also, Spenser's spelling is wreaking havoc on my own. I c/ped the bits from The Shepheardes Calendar, but I typed out the rest because I can't find Spenser's minor works online, and since editorial policy with Spenser is generally not to modernize, because of his idiosyncratic and sometimes significant spelling, and because the language in The Faerie Queene especially is deliberately archaic, after a while of transcribing these poems spelling starts to look completely nonsensical even when it's correct.

"they hung out and philosophized about poetry, and whatnot" -- so that's what they're calling it these days!

Ha! *does not write Spenser/Harvey*

(Heh, now I'm remembering that I was threatening matociquala with Spenser/Raleigh a while back. Ah, well, it can go in the cliche-inverting Elizabethan Poet Novel I will write someday, with virgin!Marlowe and happilymarried!Shakespeare.)

[dolique]

Mm, I know how that goes. I handed something in once where one of the paragraphs just ended midsentence -- the worst of it was that I'd completely forgotten what I'd been planning to say in the rest of it, which made for a really odd revision!

And yes, understood; spelling is definitely a mindset, and if you change that mindset... On a semi-related topic, I recently found the third volume of a three-volume Collected Works of Racine, and oh, the strangeness! There're gratuitous Çs in the forms of savoir, -ait is -oit, toi is toy and même mesme -- it's ridiculous, and amazing, and I'm threatening my French teacher with spelling that way on the final. ("Mais, Madame, on le disait au dix-septième siècle...")

[snerk] That novel sounds super-fun, especially coming from you. We internet groupies will nudge you into writing it for us, just watch...

[ricardienne]

Thank you for these! I am looking forward to Part II, and the rest.

I suppose they could also be considered a sort of crib to your journal. Well, crib isn't the right word -- Cliffs notes, maybe.

[angevin2]

You're most welcome. And hee, that's true, isn't it? ;)

[angevin2]

Thank you! I'm glad you're enjoying it. :)

Disturbingly, this isn't that much less informal than my early drafts of my serious academic writing. I usually get asked to phrase things in more buttoned-down fashion. ;)

[bunrab]

[nitpicky]So, in one poem, wearing scarlet accompanies bearing the wine of whoredom (I can picture the naked ladies stomping grapes) and yet in another, being clad in scarlet is like a maiden Queen? C'mon, Spense, let's be consistent on the symbology here, hmmm?[/notpick]

And I am in NO way surprised that someone who is a grad student would manage to find information about funding and scholarships in ANYTHING she researches.

[angevin2]

*laughs* This is true. ;)

Double-edged symbolism is totally a recurring thing in Spenser's poetry, though (in all seriousness) -- like, one of the major themes in FQ Book I is that Good Things and Bad Things look disturbingly alike (Lucifera gets described as "a mayden Queene," for crying out loud) and that one has to be able to discern which is which...

[lnhammer]

Just wait till you get to the climax of book VI of The Faerie Qveene ...

---L.