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The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: Selections Annotated and Explained Russell McNeil, PhD Editor, Malaspina Great Books In 1862 the English literary critic and poet Matthew Arnold described Marcus Aurelius as "the most beautiful figure in history." The Stoicism of Aurelius is grounded in rationality and rests solidly on an ethical approach rooted in nature. Stoicism promises real happiness and joy in this life and a serenity that can never be soured by personal misfortune. This philosophy has universal appeal with practical implications on problems ranging from climate change and terrorism to the personal management of sickness, aging, depression and addiction. I truly believe that the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius has much to offer us now...(Click on book cover for more)

Category:	Renaissance Literature
Name:	Edmund Spenser
Birth Year:	c. 1552
Death Year:	1599
Representative Image:
Biography, Lectures, and Research Links:	Brief Biography Blog Edmund Spenser SEARCH NOW: by title by author Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) was an English poet, and a contemporary of William Shakespeare. The Faerie Queene is his major contribution to English poetry; it is mostly a poem pandering for (and subsequently receiving!) the favours of Queen Elizabeth. The poem is a long allegory of Christian belief, tied into England's mythology of King Arthur. In form, the poem is an epic, in the style of Beowulf, Virgil, and Homer. The language is purposely antique. As such, it is supposed to immediately bear comparison to such earlier works as those mentioned above, as well as the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, whom Spenser greatly admired. Spenser's Epithalamion is the most admired of its type in the English language, and was written on the occasion of his wedding to his young bride. One poet enormously influenced by Edmund Spenser is John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, which many critics consider the greatest poem of all time. Faerie Queene. Book iii. Canto xi. St. 54: And as she lookt about, she did behold, How over that same dore was likewise writ, Be bold, be bold, and every where Be bold, That much she muz'd, yet could not construe it By any ridling skill, or commune wit. At last she spyde at that roomes upper end, Another yron dore, on which was writ, Be not too bold; whereto though she did bend Her earnest mind, yet wist not what it might intend. Detailed Biography English poet, author of the Faerie Queene, was born in London about the year 1552. The received date of his birth rests on a passage in sonnet lx. of the A moretti. He speaks there of having lived forty-one years; the Atnoretti was published in 1595, and described on the titlepage as Faerie Queene written not long since ; this would make the year of his birth 1552 or 1553. We know that London was his birthplace. This at least seems the most natural interpretation of the words - "Merry London, my most kindly nurse, That to me gave this life's first native source." In the same poem he speaks of himself as taking his name from "an house of ancient fame." Several of his pieces are addressed to the daughters of Sir John Spencer, head of the Althorp family; and in Cohn Clout's Come Home Again he describes three of the ladies as - "The honour of the noble family Of which I meanest boast myself to be." Mr R. B. Knowles, however, is of the opinion (see the Spending of the Money of Robert Nowell, privately printed, 1877) that the poet's kinsmen must be sought among the humbler Spencers of northeast Lancashire. Robert Nowell, a London citizen, left a sum of money to be distributed in various charities, and in the account-books of his executors among the names of other beneficiaries has been discovered that of "Edmund Spensore, scholar of the Merchant Taylor School, at his going to Pembroke Hall in Cambridge." The date of this benefaction is the 28th of April 1569. As the poet is known to have been a sizar of Pembroke, the identification is beyond dispute. Till this discovery it was not known where Spenser received his school education. The speculations as to the poet's parentage, started by the Nowell Ms., are naturally more uncertain. Mr Knowles found three Spensers in the books of the Merchant Taylors, and concluded that, the poorest of them, John Spenser, "a free journeyman" in the "art or mystery of clothmaking," might have been the poet's father, but he afterwards abandoned this theory. Dr Grosart, however, adhered to it, and it is now pretty generally accepted. The connexion of Spenser with Lancashire is also supported by the Nowell MS. - several Spensers of that county appear among the "poor kinsfolk" who profited by Nowell's bounty. The name of the poet's mother was Elisabeth, and he notes as a happy coincidence that it was borne by the three women of most consequence to him - wife, queen and mother (Amoretti, lxxiv.). It is natural that a poet so steeped in poetry as Spenser, should show his faculty at a very early age; and there is strong reason to believe that verses from his pen were published just as he left school at the age of sixteen or seventeen. Certain pieces, translations from Du Bellay and Petrarch, afterwards included in a volume of poems by Spenser published in 1591, are found in a miscellany, Theatre for Wordings, issued by a Flemish Protestant refugee, John van der Noodt, on the 25th of May 1569. The translations appear in blank verse in the miscellany, and are rhymed in sonnet form in the later publication, but the diction is substantially the same; the translations from Petrarch are republished with slight variations. Poets were so careless of their rights in those days and publishers took such liberties that we cannot draw for certain the conclusion that would be inevitable if the facts were of more modern date; but the probabilities are that these passages in Van der Noodt's Theatre, although the editor makes no acknowledgment, were contributed by the schoolboy Spenser. As the exercises of a schoolboy writing before our poetic diction was enriched by the great Elizabethans, they are remarkable for a sustained command of expression which many schoolboys might exhibit in translation now, but which was a rarer and more significant accomplishment when Surrey and Sackville were the highest models in post-Chaucerian English. Little is known of Spenser's Cambridge career, except that he was a sizar of Pembroke Hall, took his bachelor's degree in 1572, his master's in 1576, and left Cambridge without having obtained a fellowship. Dr Grosart's inquiries have elicited the fact that his health was not good - college allowances while he was in residence being often paid "Spenser aegrotanti." One of the fellows of Pembroke strongly influenced his destiny. This was Gabriel Harvey, a prominent figure in the university life of the time, an enthusiastic educationst, vigorous, versatile, not a little vain of his own culture and literary powers, which had gained him a certain standing in London society. The revival and advancement of English literature was a passion of the time, and Harvey was fully possessed by it. His fancy for reforming English verse by discarding rhyme and substituting unrhymed classical metres, and the tone of his controversy with Thomas Nash, have cabsed him to be regarded as merely an obstreperous and pragmatic pedant; but it is clear that Spenser, who had sense enough not to be led astray by his eccentricities, received active and generous help from him and probably not a little literary stimulus. Harvey's letters to Spenser throw a very kindly light on his character. During his residence at the university the poet acquired a knowledge of Greek, and at a later period offered to impart that language to a friend in Ireland (see Ludowick Bryskett, Discourse of Civil Life, London, 1606 - written twenty years previously). Spenser's affinity with Plato is most marked, and he probably read him in the original. Three years after leaving Cambridge, in 1579, Spenser issued his first volume of poetry, the Shepherd's Calendar. Where and how he spent the interval have formed subjects for elaborate speculation. That most of it was spent in the study of his art we may take for granted. That he lived for a time in the north parts of England; that there or elsewhere he fell in love with a lady whom he celebrates under the anagram of "Rosalind," and who was most likely Rose, a daughter of a yeoman named Dyneley, near Clitheroc; that his friend Harvey urged him to return south, and introduced him to Sir Philip Sidney; that Sidney took to him, discussed poetry with him, introduced him at court, put him in the way of preferment - are ascertained facts in his personal history. Dr Grosart conjectures with considerable plausibility that he was in Ireland in 1577. The words "for long time far estranged" in EK.'s preface to the Shepherd's Calendar point that way. Spenser undoubtedly entered the service of the earl of Leicester either ifl 1578 or a year earlier (Carew Papers). The interest of the Shepherd's Calendar is mainly personal to Spenser. Its twelve poems continue to be read chiefly because they were the first published essays of the author of the Faerie Queene, the poems in which he tried and disciplined his powers. They mark no stage in the history of pastoral poetry. The title, borrowed from a French almanack of the year 1496, which was translated into English in 1503 and frequently reprinted, is attractive hut hardly tallies with the subject. It may have been an afterthought. Spenser had too strong a genius not to make his own individuality felt in any form that he attempted, and his buoyant dexterity in handling various schemes of verse must always afford delight to the connoisseur in such things. But a reader not already interested in Spenser, or not already familiar with the artificial eclogue, would find little to attract him in the Shepherd's Calendar. The poems need a special education; given this, they are felt to be full of charm and power, a fresh and vivid spring to the splendid summer of the Faerie Queene. The diction is a studiously archaic artificial compound, partly Chaucerian, partly North Anglian, partly factitious; and the pastoral scenery is such as may be found in any country where there are sheep, hills, trees, shrubs, toadstools and running streams. That Spenser, having been, in the north of England, should have introduced here and there a touch of north country colour is natural enough, but it is not sufficient to give a character to the poems as pastoral. As such they follow continuously and do not violently, break away from Latin, Italian and French predecessors. At the same time one can quite understand on historical grounds why the Shepherd's Calendar was hailed with enthusiasm as the advent of a "new poet." Not only was it a complete work in a form then new to English literature, but the execution showed the hand of a master. There had been nothing so finished, so sustained, so masterful in grasp, so brilliant in metre and phrase, since Chaucer. It was felt at once that the poet for whom the age had been waiting had come. The little coterie of friends whose admiration the young poet hadwon in private were evidently concerned lest the wider public should be bewildered and repelled by the unfamiliar pastoral form and rustic diction. To put the public at the right point of view the poems were published with a commentary by "E.K." - supposed to be one Edward Kirke, who was an undergraduate with Spenser at Pembrok. This so-called "glosse " explained the archaic words, revealed the poet's intentions, and boasted that, as in the case of Virgil, the pastoral poetry of the "new poet" was but "a proving of the wings for higher and wider flights." The "new poet's" name was withheld; and the identification of the various "shepherds" - of Cuddie and Diggon Davie, and the beauteous golden-haired "widow's daughter of the glen" - was fortunately reserved to yield delight to the ingenious curiosity of a later age. On the subject of Spenser's obligations the "glosse" is very misleading. An eclogue drawn almost entirely from Virgil is represented as jointly inspired by Virgil and Theocritus and chiefly by the latter. Marot is belittled and his claim to be a poet called in question. As regards the twelfth eclogue suggested by and in part translated from his poetry, his influence is ignored. The stanzas Professor Hales cites as autobiographical are actually taken from Marot's eclogue, Au Roi sons les noms de Pan et Robin. Dr Grosart falls into the same error. The Shepherd's Calendar was published at Gabriel Harvey's instance, and was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. It was one out of many poetical schemes on which the young poet was busy in the flush of conscious power and high hopes excited by the admiration of the literary authorities whose approval was then most to be coveted. His letters to Harvey and Harvey's letters to him furnish hints for a very engaging fancy picture of Spenser at this stage of his life - looking at the world through rose-coloured, spectacles, high in favour with Sidney and Leicester, dating his letters from Leicester House, gaily and energetically discussing the technicalities of his art, with some provision from his. powerful friends - certain, but the form of it delightfully uncertain - going to court in the train of Leicester, growing pointed beard and mustachios of fashionable shape, and frightening his ever-vigilant friend and mentor Harvey by the light courtier-like tone of :his references to women. The studious pastoral poet from "north parts" had blossomed with surprising rapidity in the image of the gay fortune-seeking adventurers who crowded the court of the virgin queen in those stirring times. Some of the poems which he mentions to Harvey as then completed or on the anvil - his Dreams, his Nine Comedies, his Dying Pelican and his Stemmala dudlelana (singing the praises of the noble family, which was befriending him) - have not been preserved, at least in any form that can be certainly identified. Among the lost works was his English Poet - a contribution to literary criticism. He had sent Harvey a portion of the Faerie Queene, which he was eager to continue; but Harvey did not think much of it - a judgment for which Harvey is often ridiculed as a dull pedant, as if we knew for certain that what was submitted to him was identical with what was published ten years later. Spenser was appointed secretary to the lord-deputy of Ireland in 1580, and was one of the band of adventurers who, with mixed motives of love of excitement, patriotism, piety and hopes of forfeited estates, accompanied Lord Arthur Grey of Wilton to Ireland to aid in the suppression of Desmond's rebellion. Regret is sometimes expressed that the author of the Faerie Queene, who ought to have been dreamy, meditative, gentle and refined, should have been found in such company, and should have taken part in the violent and bloody scenes of Lord Grey's two years' attempt at "pacification." But such things must be judged with reference to the circumstances and the spirit of the time, and it must be remembered that England was then engaged in a fierce struggle for existence against the Catholic powers of the Continent. Of Lord Grey's character his secretary was an enthusiastic admirer, exhibiting him in the Faerie Queene as Arthegal, the personification of justice; and we know exactly what were his own views of Irish policy, and how strongly he deplored that Lord Grey was not permitted to carry them out. Spenser's View of the State of Ireland drawn up after fourteen years' experience, but first printed in 1633 by Sir James Ware, who complains of Spenser's harshness and inadequate knowledge (History of Ireland, appendix), is not the work of a gentle dreamer, but of an energetic and shrewd public official. The View is not a descriptive work; there is nothing in the style to indicate that it was written by a poet; it is an elaborate state paper, the exposition in the form of a dialogue of a minutely considered plan for the pacification of lreland, written out of zeal for the public service for the eyes of the government of the day. A very thoroughgoing plan it is. After passing in review the history and character of the Irish, their laws, customs, religion, habits of life, armour, dress, social institutions and finding "evil usages" in every department, he propounds his plan of "reformation." Reformation can be effected only by the sword, by the strong hand. The interlocutor in the dialogue holds up his hands in horror. Does he propose extermination? By no means; but he would give the Irish a choice between submission and extermination. The government had vacillated too long, and, fearing the cost of a thorough operation, had spent twice as much without many way mending matters. Let them send into Ireland 10,000 foot and 1,000 horse, disperse them in garrisons - a complete scheme of localities is submitted - give the Irish twenty days to come in; if they did not come in then, give no quarter afterwards, but hunt them down like wild beasts in the winter time when the covert is thin; "if they be well followed one winter, ye shall have little work to do with them the next summer"; famine would complete the work of the sword; and in eighteen months' time peace would be restored and the ground cleared for plantation by English colonists. There must be no flinching in the execution of this plan - "no remorse or drawing back for the sight of any such rueful object as must thereupon follow, nor for compassion of their calamities, seeing that by no other means it is, possible to recover them, and that these are not of will but of very urgent necessity." The government had out of foolish compassion drawn back before when Lord Grey had brought the recalcitrant Irish to the necessary extremity of famine; the gentle poet warns them earnestly against a repetition of the blunder. Such was Spenser's plan for the pacification of Ireland, propounded not on his own authority, but as having support in "the consultations and actions of very wise governors and counsellors whom he had sometimes heard treat thereof." He knew that it was "bloody and cruel"; but he contended passionately that it was necessary for the maintenance of English power and the Protestant religion. The method was repugnant to the kindly nature of average Englishmen; from the time of Lord Grey no English authority had the heart to go through with it till another remorseless zealot appeared in the person of Cromwell. That Cromwell knew the treatise of "the sage-and serious Spenser," perhaps through Milton, is probable from the fact that the poet's Irish estates were secured to his grandson by the Protector's intervention in 1657. These estates had been granted to Spenser as his share in the redistribution of Munster - 3000 acres of land and Kilcolman Castle, an ancient seat of the Desmonds, in the north of the county of Cork. The elaborate and business-like character of the View shows that the poet was no sinecurist, but received his reward for substantial political services. He ceased to be secretary to the lord-deputy when Lord Grey was recalled in 1582; but he continued in the public service, and in I 586 was promoted to the onerous position of clerk to the council of Munster. Amidst all the distractions of his public life in Ireland Spenser kept up his interest in literature, and among proper subjects for reforn included Irish poetry, of which he could judge only through the medium of translations. He allows it some merit - "sweet wit," "good invention," "some pretty flowers " - but laments that it is "abused to the gracing of wickedness and vice." Meanwhile he seems to have proceeded steadily with the composition of the Faerie Queene, translating his varied experience of men and affairs into the picturesque forms of his allegory, and expressing through them his conception of the immutable principles that ought to regulate human conduct. He had, as we have seen, conceived a work of the kind and made a beginning before he left England. The conception must have been very much deepened and widened and in every way enriched by his intimate daily contact with the actual struggle of conflicting individuals and interests and policies in a great crisis. Some four or five years later, being asked in a mixed company of English officials in Ireland (as recorded in Lodowick Bryskett's Discourse of Civil Life) to give off-hand a short sketch of "the ethical part of moral philosophy" and the practical uses of the study, Spenser explained to these simpleminded men that the subject was too intricate for an impromptu exposition, but that he had in hand a work called the Faerie Queene in which an ethical system would be exhibited in action. The respect paid by his official brethren to Spenser as a man, "not only perfect in the Greek tongue, but also very well read in philosophy, both moral and natural," is an interesting item in his biography. Some years later still, when Spenser was settled at Kilcolman Castle, Sir Walter Raleigh found him with three books of the Faerie Queene completed, and urged him to come with them to London. London accordingly he revisited in 1589, after nine years' absence. There is a very pretty record of this visit in Cohn Clout's Come Home Again, published in 1595, but written in 1591, immediately after his return to Kilcolman. The incidents of the visit, by that time matters of wistful memory, are imaged as a shepherd's excursion from his quiet pastoral life into the great world. Cohn Clout calls round him once again the masked figures of the Shepherd's Calendar, and describes to them what he saw, how he fared, and whom he met at the court of Cynthia, and how, through the influence of "the Shepherd of the Ocean," he was admitted at timely hours to play on his oaten pipe in the great queen's presence. How much is pure fiction and how much veiled fact in this picture cannot now be distinguished, but it is undoubted that Spenser, though his chief patrons Leicester and Sidney were now dead, was very graciously received by the great world on his return to London. Not only did the queen grant him an audience, but many ladies of the court, several of whom he afterwards honoured with dedications, honoured him with their patronage. The first three books of the Faerie Queene, which were entered at Stationers' Hall on the 1st of December 1589, were published in 1590, and he was proclaimed at once with remarkable unanimity by all the writers of the time as the first of living poets. From the first week of its publication the literary world has continued unanimous about the Faerie Queene, except on minor points. When romanticismism was at its lowest ebb Pope read Spenser, in his old age with as much delight as in his boyhood. Spenser speaks himself of having had his detractors, of having suffered from the venomous tooth of the Blatant Feast, and he seems to have had in more than ordinary share the poet's sensitiveness to criticism; but the detraction or indifference have generally been found among men who, like the lord high treasurer Burghle, have no liking for poetry of any kind. The secret of Spenser's enduring popularity with poets and lovers of poetry lies specially in this, that he excels in the poet's peculiar gift, the instinct for verbal music. Shakespeare, or the author of the sonnet usually assigned to him, felt and expressed this when he drew the parallel between "music and sweet poetry " - "Thou lovest to hear the sweet melodious sound That Phoebus' lute, the queen of music, makes; And I in deep delight am chiefly drowned Whenas himself to singing he beta,kes." This is an early word in criticism of Spenser, and it is the last word about his prime and unquestionable excellence - a word in which all critics must agree, Whether he had imagination in the highest degree or only, luxuriant fancy, and whether he could tell a story in the highest epic manner or only put together a richly varied series of picturesque incidents, are disputable points; but about the enchantment of his verse there can be no difference of opinion. It matters not in the least that he gains his melody often by archaic affectations and licences of diction; there, however purchased, the marvellously rich music is. In judging of the structure of the Faerie Queene we must always remember that, long and diffuse as it is, what we have is but a fragment of the poet's design, and that the narrative is regulated by an allegorical purpose; but, however intricate, however confused, the reader may feel the succession of incidents to be, when he studies the succession of incidents, it is only at the call of duty that he is likely to occufiy himself with such a study in reading Spenser. The ethical value of the allegory has been very variously estimated. The world would probably never have divined that there was any allegory if he had not himself drawn attention to it in a prose dedication and in doggerel headings to the cantos. It was apparently at his friend Raleigh's suggestion that the poet condescended to explain his ethical purpose in A Letter of Me Author's addressed to Sir Walter and dated the 23rd of January 1589 - 1590. Undoubtedly the peculiar "poetic luxury" of the Faery Queen can be enjoyed without any reference to the allegory; even Professor Dowden, the most eloquent champion of Spenser's claims as a "teacher," admits that it is a mistake to look for minute correspondence between outward symbol and underlying sense, and that the poet is least enjoyable where he is most ingenious. Still the allegory governs the structure of the poem, and Spenser himself attached great importanee to it as determining his position among poets. The ethical purpose. is distinctive of the poem as a whole; it was foremost in Spenser's mind when he conceived the scheme of the poem, and present with him as he built up and articulated the skeleton; it was in this respect that he claimed to have "overpassed" his avowed models Ariosto and Tasso. If we wish to get an idea of Spenser's imaginative force and abundance, or to see his creations as he saw them, we must not neglect the allegory. It is obvious from all that he says of his own work that iii his eyes the ethical meaning not only heightened the interest of the marvelIon sly rich pageant of heroes and heroines, enchanters and monsters, but was the one thing that redeemed it from romantic commonplace. For the right appreciation of many of the characters and incidents a knowledge of the allegory is indispensable,. For example, the slaughter of Error by the Red Cross knight would be merely disgusting but for its symbolic character; the iron Talus and his iron phallus - a revolting and brutally cruel monster if he is not regarded as an image of the executioner of righteous law; the Blatant Beast, a purely grotesque and ridiculous monster, to outward view, acquires a serious interest when he is known to be an impersonation of malignant detraction. Notwithstanding its immense range, the Faerie Queene is profoundly national and Elizabethan, containing many more or less cryptic allusions to contemporary persons and interests. It has never been popular abroad as is proved by the fact that there is no complete translation of it in any of the Continental Languages. This is doubtless on account of a certain monotony in the subject-matter, which is only partially relieved by subtle variations. The same objection applies to the famous "Spenserian stanza" (see below) with its concluding Alexandrine. It was by no means a happy invention, but its infelicity is disguised by its author's marvellous rhythm, and thus recommended it was adopted by Byron and Keats. In his own day Spenser was criticized by Sidney, Belijonson, Daniel and others for the artificiality of his language, his "aged accents and untimely words," but Ben Jonson went further - "Spenser's stanza pleased him not, nor his matter." Milton, on the other band, duly appreciated "our sage and serious poet," and he has been followed by a long line of distinguished judges. It was Charles Lamb who named Spenser "the poet's poet." After the publication of the Faerie Queene Spenser seems to have remained in London for more than a year to enjoy his triumph and then returned to London probably In. 1595. He had married in the interval a lady whose Christian name was Elizabeth - Dr Grosart says Elizabeth Boyle. The marriage, celebrated on the 11th of June 1594, was followed by a rapid succession of publications. The first was a volume (entered at Stationers' Hall, on the 10th of November 1594; published 1595) containing the Arnoretti, a series of exquisite sonnets commemorative of the moods and incidents of his courtship, "and the magnificent Epithalamion, incomparably the finest of his minor poems. As in the case of the Complaints, the publisher for obvious reasons issued this volume nominally without his authority. Cohn Clout's Come Home Again was published in the same year, with a dedication to Sir Walter Raleigh, dated 1591. Early in 1596 the second three books of the Faerie Queene were entered in the register of Stationers' Hall, and in the course of the same year were published his Four Hymns, his Prothalasnion, and his Astrophel, a pastoral lament for Sir Philip Sidney, which he dedicated to the countess of Essex. That Spenser wrote more of the Faerie Queene during the last two years of his life, and that the MS. perished in the sack of Kilcolman Castle by the rebels, may plausibly be conjectured, but cannot be ascertained. During those years he would seem to have been largely occupied with political and personal cares. He describes himself as a disappointed suitor at. court. He drew up his View of Ireland in 1596 when he was in London, and from various circumstances it is evident that he had hopes of some kind from the favour of Essex. The View, with its urgent entreaty that Essex should be sent to Ireland, was entered at Stationers' Hall in April 1598, but he did not obtain leave to publish it. Burghley, who had long stood in his way, died in August of that year, and next month Spenser, who seems to have returned to Ireland in 1597, was appointed sheriff of Cork. In October Tyrone's rebellion broke out, and Spenser's house was sacked and burned. The poet himself escaped, and in December was sent to London with dispatches. Again he ventured to urge upon the queen his plan for the thorough "reformation" of Ireland. ‘But his own end was near. On the 16th of January 1599 he died at Westminster, ruined in fortune, if not heart-broken, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, near his master Chaucer. Ben Jonson asserted that he perished for lack of bread, and that when the earl of Essex, hearing of his distress, sent him "20 pieces," the poet declined, saying that he had no time to spend them. 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