Amoretti

The Amoretti by Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-99), published in 1595, is one of the great Elizabethan cycles of love poetry. The Amoretti cycle of poems is printed here in full, with each sonnet on its own on a page.

This is beautiful poetry, poems of love, full of Edmund Spenser's delicate and intricate way with words. The Amoretti are packed of vivid imagery, of the natural world, of the seasons, of suns and moons, of days and nights - this is love poetry at its most refined and intelligent.

Technically, Edmund Spenser knew everything about poetry. He wrote many sonnets (including the Amoretti), and in his The Faerie Queene he composed hundreds of nine-line stanzas. There is a stately progress to Spenser's poesie: he did not rush things. He took his time. William Wordsworth spoke of the 'Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven with the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace'.

In the Amoretti, is cycle of love sonnets, Spenser tackled his target, his beloved, from many directions. Spenser is unsurpassed in the art of poetic exaltation - no other poet of the era - and of subsequent or previous eras - can top Spenser's sense of the superlative and the exalted. Spenser's poetry is a litany of paeans: 'Epithalamion', 'A Hymn in Honour of Love', 'A Hymn in Honour of Beauty', 'A Hymn of Heavenly Beauty', 'A Hymn of Heavenly Love', 'Prothalamion', 'The Calendar' and of course The Faerie Queene all contain passages of lyrical praise.

As with William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser's view of the world was crystallized in his poetry is an expansive, dramatic, encyclopaedic vision. The sheer amount of work by Spenser - the copious letters, 'Complaints', 'Hymns', sonnets, and stanzas in The Faerie Queene - attest to his love of writing. The length of The Faerie Queene is not the least astonishing thing about it. Spenser clearly had a lot to say, and would not stop until he had said it.

With bibliography and new illustrations. ISBN 9781861713544. 128 pages.

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