The Shorter Poems

By Edmund Spenser

Book Overview

Although he is most famous for The Faerie Queene, this volume demonstrates that for these poems alone Spenser should still be ranked as one of England's foremost poets.
Spenser's shorter poems reveal his generic and stylistic versatility, his remarkable linguistic skill and his mastery of complex metrical forms.
The range of this volume allows him to emerge fully in the varied and conflicting personae he adopted, as satirist and eulogist, elegist and lover, polemicist and prophet.
The volume includes The Shepeardes Calender, Complaints, and A Theatre for Wordlings.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140434453
• ISBN13: 9780140434453
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 816 Pages
• Weight: 1.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.9" x 5.3" x 7.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

The definitive version for the serious academic student

If you are in any way responsible academically for Spenser's shorter works, this is the book. Editing, of course, refers to how the text of the poems is managed with regard to conflicts in early editions, etc. Here, decisions on text are made consistently and all changes vs. early texts are listed in the Appendices. Also useful, even though it's now more than 12 years out of date, is the annotated bibliography, which provides a good starting point for additional literary research.