steve miller band dream weaver interpretation

Among the heroic poets named in Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh as worthy practitioners of the form, Virgil was generally regarded as the greatest, and Spenser, like Dante and Petrarch before him, seems to have taken Virgil as his personal mentor and guide. The attempt to write a neoclassical epic in English was without precedent-unless, perhaps, one includes Sidney ‘s Arcadia (1590), which was begun at about the same time. For him to compare his work with the most exalted poetry of Italy, the glittering center of European culture in this period, must have seemed to many of his readers mere bravado or self-delusion.

Now, to set out to depict the queen herself and to “fashion” members of her nobility in virtuous and well-bred discipline was certainly a bold undertaking for the son of a London weaver. It is “an historicall fiction,” written to glorify Queen Elizabeth and “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.” In pursuing this latter aim, the poet explains that he has followed the example of the greatest epic writers of the ancient and the modern worlds: Homer and Virgil, Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso. In a letter addressed to his neighbor Sir Walter Ralegh, Spenser sets out to explain the “general intention and meaning” of his richly elaborated epic. Among Spenser’s many contributions to English literature, he is the originator and namesake of the Spenserian stanza and the Spenserian sonnet.Ī glimpse of Spenser’s audacious plan to help provide England with a great national literature appears in an appendix printed in the 1590 edition of the first three books of The Faerie Queene. Along with Sidney, Spenser set out to create a body of work that could parallel the great works of European poets such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio and extend the line of English literary culture began by Chaucer. His epic poem, The Faerie Queene, was written in honor of Queen Elizabeth I and in celebration of the Tudor dynasty.

Spenser’s reinvention of classical pastoral, The Shepheardes Calendar, was admired by Sir Philip Sidney as a major contribution to the development of English literature and national culture. Since parish records for the area of London where the poet grew up were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, his birth date is uncertain, though the dates of his schooling and a remark in one of his sonnets ( Amoretti 60) lend credence to the date traditionally assigned, which is around 1552. He was born into the family of an obscure cloth maker named John Spenser, who belonged to the Merchant Taylors’ Company and was married to a woman named Elizabeth, about whom almost nothing is known. Edmund Spenser is considered one of the preeminent poets of the English language.

Steve miller band dream weaver interpretation