Edmund Spenser

[Icarus]

I just bought an old copy of The Works of Spenser and was wondering if anyone had read it or anything by him?

[mitsuki lover]

Not that I can think of at the moment.Although I have read several plays by his contemporary William Shakespeare.

[Kaori]

I love Spenser; I've read the Faerie Queene, the Epithalamion, and a few of the Amoretti. Are there any of his works in particular you're planning on starting with?

[Icarus]

Since it's the first in the book, I started the Faerie Queene. This is the most excited I've been about a work in verse.

[JasonPratt]

FQ is certainly good! Unfinished (Robert Jordan joins Spencer as being one of the relatively few authors who died without ending his work), but good!

I actually 'invented' the sonnet form Spencer uses in FQ, when I was in high school, without realizing it had been done before. Darn. {g} Amusing, though.

If you want extra fun, try dictating it to tape. Poetic epics simply rule when listened to in cars. (True, you could probably buy a recording somewhere, but why miss out on the fun of reading it yourself out loud?)

[Kaori]

It's true that he originally intended to write twelve books, not six, though I've head it argued that Spenser was artistically satisfied with the Faerie Queene after six books and decided that more wasn't needed. But it certainly isn't uncommon to die with an unfinished project--the same thing happened to Chaucer, Tyndale, Fitzgerald, and arguably Dostoyevsky.

The project of reading all of the Faerie Queene out loud and recording it sounds enjoyable, though it would also require massive amounts of time.