Edmund Spenser William Allan Oram Edmund Spenser's contemporaries recognized him as the greatest English nondramatic poet of his generation. This book, the first comprehensive introduction to Spenser's work since 1963, places his epic, The Fairie Queene, in the context of his shorter works and gives those works extended treatment. Aside from his epic, Spenser wrote in nearly every nondramatic genre available to Elizabethan poets--eclogue book, complaint, satire, mytho- logical narrative, pastoral elegy, sonnet seqence, marriage poem, mythological hymn. While showing himself capable from the first, in The Shepheardes Calender, of dazzling generic experimentation that experimentation continued and deepened during his life, especially in the two genres of pastoral and complaint. This study discusses the generic traditions he inherits, and suggests how his poetry extends and criticizes those traditions. The book also treats Spenser's imaginative revision of his experience in his later poety, in which he stages himself in various roles and creates an ongoing fictional biography. In doing so it traces Spenser's ambivalence toward the court of Elizabeth I--a court he hoped to rise in as a young man, needed to depend on as an English landowner in Ireland, and continued throughout his life to distrust. Author William Oram argues that this ambivalence derives partly from his view of his poetic vocation. As a prophetic poet he saw himself as the court's moral center; yet he remarks angrily, and repeatedly, that the court views him as no more than another entertainer whose function is "to please." A new volume in Twayne's English Authors Series, Ednund Spenser prefaces the discussion of Spenser's works with a biographical chapter, and follows it with a brief account of Spenser's influence. Oram agues that "Spenser changed significantly in method and emphasis over the twenty-odd years of his poetic career." Accordingly he treats Spenser's works in the order that they were published and divides The Faerie Queene into its two halves, setting each in the con- text of related shorter Poems. This prodigious monograph will serve as a resource for understanding all of Spenser's poetic works, providing readers with points of departure as well as firm grounding for continuing interpretation. William Allan Oram is Helen Means Professor of English at Smith College. He is coordinating editor of the Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser and author of articles on Spenser, Milton, and other Renaissance writers. His current projects examine Spenser's treatment of character in The Fairie Queene and his tendency in later works to return to and criticize earlier ones.