Not the people's poet

Four hundred years have passed since the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser died in despair in London lodgings a year after his flight from Ireland. The poet who was to inspire artists as diverse as Milton, Keats and Tennyson had left no money for his burial, and the expenses were borne by the disgraced Earl of Essex. In death, he lies in Westminster Abbey beside Chaucer, his artistic mentor. While The Faerie Queen is about as magnificent a monument as any poet could aspire to, the facts of Spenser's life remain sketchy, and career details - linked as they are to the history of his time - overshadow the personal ones.

We know he was born about 1552 in London, in humble circumstances, and that he claimed descent from "an house of auncient fame", the Spensers of Althrop. Yes, those Spensers. They weren't always as wealthy as they were to become, however.

As a boy Edmund had attended the then newly founded Merchant Taylor's school as a "poore scholler". There he received a superb grounding in classics and had also begun to write verse. In 1569 he went to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge as a sizar, which meant he earned his tuition and keep in exchange for doing manual jobs about the college. The undergraduate Spenser studied rhetoric, logic and philosophy and later as a post-graduate would add astronomy and maths to his Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Spenser the man was as committed to material wealth as he was to glory as a poet. Perhaps his early poverty explains this.

There is no concealing the facts that Spenser's role in Ireland is the least pleasant aspect of his career and that it overshadows his literary legacy.

The poet had first come to Ireland in 1577 and on his return to England entered the service of the powerful Earl of Leicester and became friends with Leicester's nephew, fellow poet Philip Sidney, who would die aged 32 in 1586 and would later be honoured by Spenser in the elegy, Astrophell.

In 1579, Spenser married his first wife and rapidly became at home at court. This confidence is evident in his political satire Mother Hubberds Tale. His rise seemed assured. He returned to this country during the following year as secretary to Lord Deputy Grey of Wilton. In 1587 Spenser took up residence in the Kilcolman Castle, near Doneraile in Co Cork. Two years later, Sir Walter Ralegh visited him. Here Spenser was to write the infamous A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland, as well The Faerie Queen, the marriage poem Epithalamion, the Amoretti sonnet sequence and the autobiographical pastoral Colin Clouts Come Home Againe.

Now in ruins, the castle retains an austere elegance. Resembling a towerhouse, it overlooks busy agricultural land and is adjacent to a wildfowl reserve. Formerly a Desmond stronghold, it was granted to Spenser, along with some 3,028 acres, after the Desmond Rebellion. It was his neighbour Ralegh who persuaded Spenser to show the first three books of The Faerie Queen to the monarch herself, who was impressed and awarded him a pension of £50, a fair sum, although Spenser was disappointed. The three books or parts were published in 1590, and six years later, a further three completed the work, although there was no additional gift from Elizabeth.

Writing in 1936, C.S. Lewis in his role as Renaissance literature scholar, rather than as the creator of Narnia, stressed that "Spenser was the instrument of a detestable policy in Ireland, and in his 5th book the wickedness he had shared in begins to corrupt his imagination". In fairness to Spenser, however, it is important not to confuse the poet with the highly practical Elizabethan administrator which Spenser also happened to be. Dr Primrose Thornley, an authority on Elizabethan poetry who introduced Spenser to several generations of UCD English students, alerting them to his ironies and humour, believes his politics are to blame for his unpopularity - nowadays he is seldom read outside the universities: "He was a colonialist and it is possible to dig into him as such in order to show the depth of the wickedness of the Elizabethans who as we know, were not a gentle people." Pointing to the layers of meanings to be found in Spenser, she says "it is always a shame to read politics onto literature, or art. It is as if one were to decide not to listen to Wagner in case his music had inspired Nazism."

Justice is, ironically, the virtue under scrutiny in Book Five of The Faerie Queen. Probably more than any other literary work of its period, Spenser's immensely rich and complex allegorical epic illustrates the medieval world of fact and fantasy, and it also epitomises, to use Tillyard's phrase, the Elizabethan notion of "cosmic order". Despite the lush beauty of his often deliberately archaic verse, Spenser was neither a dreamer nor a romantic. The career civil servant could be judged a literary adventurer, considering that his life's work could be seen as an act of worship to one woman who also happened to be Queen. The epic is a celebration of national and imperial power. At its heart is the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism. Ireland as a Catholic country in an on-going state of rebellion presented the greatest threat to the Commonwealth. Not only was it an obvious point of entry for any continental invasion force, but Ireland also represented chaos in contrast to England's order. The Elizabethans' sense of the fragility of their civilisation was greatly increased by their embattled position as a small Protestant nation smarting from the loss of Calais in 1558, which ended English power in France, and confronted by a largely Roman Catholic continent.

The most irritating personification of savagery and lawlessness was Ireland, which continued to defy colonialisation in spite of English rule. Here the monarch meant nothing and there was no trace of the royal presence. The Irish had grown so unruly that "no laws, no penalties can restrain" wrote Spenser in A Vewe of the Present State of Ire- land, "but that they do in the violence of that fury tread down and trample underfoot all both divine and human things, and laws themselves they do specially rage at and rend in pieces". According to him, there was only one solution: order must be imposed "by the sword . . . I mean the royal power of the prince, which ought to stretch itself forth in her chief strength, to the redress and cutting off of those evils". Spenser was well praised on the completion of The Faerie Queen, but it also earned him the anger of James VI of Scotland, who felt his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, to be libelled by the characterisation of Duessa.

There was no action. Spenser soon had bigger problems. His views on the Irish crisis caused Viscount Roche of Fermoy to order "none of his people should have trade or commerce with Mr Spenser" and he was widely shunned. Having become Sheriff of Cork in 1598, he was present when Tyrone rebelled and Kilcoman was sacked. One of his children by his second marriage is believed to have perished in the flames. The poet fled to England and died in London on January 6th 1599.

As a poet, Spenser's education provided him with a range of learning which in turn gave his work layers of meaning and a depth of classical allusion and cross-reference. He set out to emulate and surpass Ariosto and Tasso. It also gave him the ability to experiment with language, often archaic language, and technique, as he did in The Shepheardes Calender (1579), a work which, though conforming to the ancient pastoral tradition, was as original on its publication as The Wasteland would prove in 1922.

In the Calender, he set up an internal debate as he would later do in The Faerie Queen, he bemoans the state of English poetry, while also praising its dignity. It is also a deliberate return to Chaucerian English. With The Faerie Queen, Spenser created a world. It is not a performance; he actively struggles with his continued allegory - and this is an important point.

On one level it may be read as a vast, if disjointed, novel moving between vagueness and deliberation, for it certainly is a series of narratives. Interestingly the first commentary ever written on the poem was by Spenser himself in its barbed preface, A Letter of the Authors, "expounding his whole intention in the course of this worke" and which is intended to deflect his critics. A cast of characters, knights and maidens, some heroic, some helpless, move through tales based around various virtues, from Holiness in Book 1, to Temperance in Book 2, Chastity in Book 3, Friendship in Book 4, Justice in Book 5 - the part pertitent to the Irish situation - and Courtesy in Book 6.

The Faerie Queen is political as well as religious; it is also an odyssey, at times tortuous both for the poet and the reader. It delights and challenges, at times baffles but seldom wanes. Once ensnared by Spenser's intricate labyrinth, one which serves as the narrative bridge between the Anglo-Saxon heroic sagas, the middle-English of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales or Langland's Piers Plowman and the Latinised 17th-century English of Milton's Paradise Lost, it proves difficult to escape.