<p>Written to celebrate the author’s courtship of his future wife, <a href="https://www.longhousepress.org/authors/edmund-spenser">Spenser’</a>s <i>Amoretti and Epithalamion</i> perfectly embodies the image of what the sonnet form would come to represent in the English tradition: ardent devotion, clever wordplay, and ornate language. Unlike the anguished, unrequited love that defines many Renaissance sequences, Spenser’s collection is notable for its reciprocity; the beloved is not a distant, passive ideal but an active, resistant presence whose eventual yielding feels genuinely earned. The 89 sonnets in this cycle expose the multifaceted tensions of the two lovers, crowned by the cosmic magnificence of the <i>Epithalamion</i>, which culminates in the couple’s happy wedding.</p>

Poetry