Poetry
Spenser's Epithalamion is the most admired of its type in the English language. It was written for his wedding to his young bride, Elizabeth Boyle. The poem consists of 365 long lines, corresponding to the days of the year; 68 short lines, representing the sum of the 52 weeks, 12 months, and 4 seasons of the annual cycle; and 24 stanzas, corresponding to the diurnal and sidereal hours.
Writing The Faerie Queene was a time consuming project for Spenser. Due to this, he was not able to write for about a decade after his second anonymous verse piece, he was also known as a promising poet of his generation (Maley 20). Elizabeth I recognized Spenser by giving him a yearly pension for his works on February 25, 1591 (Maley 24). Roche was a person that complained about Spenser which put a struggle to keep Spenser's holding he made permanent in 1593, in Ireland (Maley 24). James VI was not pleased with the second edition of The Faerie Queene in 1596, since there was an allegorical trial of Mary Queen of Scots who was the mother of the Scottish king (Maley 25).
It is said that Spenser is the man to have crafted the phrase "without reason or rhyme." The Queen promised him payment of one hundred pounds for his poetry, a so-called "reason for the rhyme." The Lord High Treasurer William Cecil, however, considered the sum too much. After a long while without receiving his payment, Spenser sent the Queen this quatrain:
I was promis'd on a time,
To have a reason for my rhyme:
But from that time unto this season,
I had neither rhyme or reason.
She immediately ordered Cecil to send Spenser his due sum.
This may not have been the first use of the phrase, as it is believed that John Russell's Boke of Nuture (circa 1460) uses the words "As for ryme or reson, ye forewryter was not to blame."
Read more about this topic: Edmund Spenser
Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
““Poetry’s unnat’ral; no man ever talked poetry ‘cept a beadle on boxin’ day, or Warren’s blackin’ or Rowland’s oil, or some o’ them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.””
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world—so that the moment of intense turning seems still and universal—all are here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)