什麼是史賓塞

Spenser, Edmund

英國詩人。進入劍橋大學以前的生活鮮爲人知。第一部重要作品《牧人月曆》（1579），可稱作英國文藝復興的第一部作品。1580年時他顯然正在列斯特伯爵手下服務，併成爲以西德尼爵士爲首的文人團體的成員。1580年擔任愛爾蘭領主的祕書，在那兒度過餘生；1588或1589年在科克附近的基爾科曼（Kilcolman）獲得一筆很大的財產。1590年出版長篇諷喻詩《仙后》的第一部分（首次頁碼版，1609），爲虛構的新教和清教間的辯護，是對英格蘭和伊莉莎白一世女王的讚美。這是伊莉莎白時期的重要詩篇，也是英語詩最偉大的作品之一；其所採用的富於革命性的九行詩節形式，稱爲「史賓塞詩節」，被後來的很多詩人採用。他爲這部詩計畫了十二部書，但只完成了剛過一半。其他詩作還有十四行詩組《愛情小詩》（1595）和《結婚曲》（1595）。1598年的愛爾蘭起義中，基爾科曼被燒燬，史賓塞可能在不久後於絕望中死去。

1552/1553～1599年

Spenser, Edmund

English poet. Little is known for certain about his life before he entered Cambridge University. His first important publication, The Shepheardes Calender (1579), can be called the first work of the English literary Renaissance. By 1580 he was apparently serving the Earl of Leicester and was part of a literary circle led by Sir Philip Sidney. In 1580 he became secretary to the lord deputy of Ireland, where he spent much of his remaining life; in 1588 or 1589 he took over a large property at Kilcolman, near Cork. In 1590 he published the first part of the long allegorical poem The Faerie Queene (first folio ed., 1609), an imaginative vindication of Protestantism and Puritanism and a glorification of England and Elizabeth I. The central poem of the Elizabethan period and one of the greatest poems in English, it was composed in a revolutionary nine-line stanzaic pattern, the “Spenserian stanza,” that was used by many later poets. Of the 12 books he planned for the poem, he completed just over half. Amoretti (1595), a sonnet sequence, and Epithalamion (1595), a marriage ode, are among his other works. In the Irish uprising of 1598, Kilcolman was burned; Spenser, probably in despair, died shortly after.