史宾塞(1552/1553～1599年)

Spenser, Edmund

英国诗人。进入剑桥大学以前的生活鲜为人知。第一部重要作品《牧人月历》（1579），可称作英国文艺复兴的第一部作品。1580年时他显然正在列斯特伯爵手下服务，并成为以西德尼爵士为首的文人团体的成员。1580年担任爱尔兰领主的秘书，在那儿度过余生；1588或1589年在科克附近的基尔科曼（Kilcolman）获得一笔很大的财产。1590年出版长篇讽喻诗《仙后》的第一部分（首次页码版，1609），为虚构的新教和清教间的辩护，是对英格兰和伊莉莎白一世女王的赞美。这是伊莉莎白时期的重要诗篇，也是英语诗最伟大的作品之一；其所采用的富於革命性的九行诗节形式，称为「史宾塞诗节」，被後来的很多诗人采用。他为这部诗计画了十二部书，但只完成了刚过一半。其他诗作还有十四行诗组《爱情小诗》（1595）和《结婚曲》（1595）。1598年的爱尔兰起义中，基尔科曼被烧毁，史宾塞可能在不久後於绝望中死去。

English version：

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.