Customer Reviews

Shorter Poems: A Selection

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This is a selection published by Everyman of Edmund Spenser's shorter poems, in other words, the stuff he wrote besides The Faerie Queene. The poems it contains are "The Shepherds' Calendar," "Muiopotmos: Or, the Fate of the Butterfly," "Colin Clout's Come Home Again," "Amoretti and Epithalamion," and "Prothalamion." As you can see by the titles, this edition publishes the poems in modernized spelling.

I would recommend this book mostly to people who are just starting to read Spenser. People are often intimidated by his Elizabethan spelling, and this edition can help a beginner get past that. Plus, at about 195 pages of poems, it's a compact selection of the best of Spenser. But for the more devoted admirer of Spenser, I suggest getting the Penguin Classics edition of "The Shorter Poems" of Edmund Spenser. It prints all his shorter poems in Spenser's original spelling. I don't know if that particular edition is available in the U.S. yet, but you can currently purchase it through Amazon.com.uk.