ABSTRACT
The role of poet changes from age to age and even from generation to generation, as does any social role; and in a complex society like that of Elizabethan England, the poet’s role is as likely as any other to be riven by contradictory expectations. Renaissance literary theory, supported by the illustrious example of antiquity, made the poet a source of cultural authority second only to the monarch. As Jonson remarked, ‘Every beggerly Corporation affoords the State a Major, or two Bailiffs, yearly: but, solus Rex, aut Poeta, non quotannis nascitur [only the king or the poet is not born each year]’ (ed 1925-52, 8:637). Yet the actual practice and literary self-presentation of most Elizabethan poets, particularly those of Spenser’s generation, suggest that the poet was considered a marginal figure, a delinquent, who, in his self-willed pursuit of love and beauty, departs from the ethical norms that ideally should govern both self and society. Spenser’s presentation of himself as poet was caught between these conflicting notions. Though he sought to establish himself as a major national poet, the official literary spokesman of the newly emerging British empire, he shared the generic forms and the practical occasions of his poetry-writing contemporaries; and with those forms and occasions came a limiting idea of the poet and his career.
