When the Second Edition of Edmund Spenser's Poetry appeared in 1982,it was already clear that something in the nature of a revolution in Spenser studies was taking place, and that new methods of reading texts, often deriving from the critical practice of such postmoderns as Derrida, Foucault,and Lacan--together with other influential captains of literary theory--were challenging earlier assumptions about Spenser's poetry. This revolution has in the last decade or so become an information explosion of enormous and bewildering variety. Regularly stimulated by cool and/or acid critical pronouncements like those of Catherine Belsey ("criticism can no longer be isolated from other areas of knowledge"), or Terry Eagleton, who trashes "a sterile critical formalism, piously swaddled with eternal verities,"all of the critical developments touched upon in the Preface to the Second Edition have flowered in profusion.

Building on the strengths of two previous editions, the revised and enlarged Third Edition continues to offer more poetry than any other comparable volume. All selections are based on early and established texts. To facili-tate discussion of the place of the body and of pastoral elements in Spenser's epic,the Third Edition includes more of The Faerie Queene: from Book II, canto 9 (the House of Alma), and, from Book VI, the remainder of canto 10 and all of cantos 11-12. The Shepheardes Calender is again represented by six eclogues, with the much-discussed "Februarie" replacing "June." Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, in- creasingly a focus of critical attention, is an important addition, and Amoretti is now offered complete. All poems are fully glossed and precisely annotated. In addition,an Editors' Note exploring important issues follows each selection.

Seventeen new critical essays, judiciously chosen from the many published since 1982, have been added while eleven of the original commentaries (including that by Samuel Taylor Coleridge) remain. Newly represented in the Third Edition are Spenser's contemporary William Camden and, from the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf, William Nelson, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Donald Cheney, Judith Anderson,Richard Helgerson, Louis Adrian Montrose, and David Lee Miller. The critical essays on the House of Busyrane, Spenser's pastoral, Muiopotmos, and Amoretti (eight of twelve essays are new) are grouped to "speak" to each other in ways sure to stimulate class discussions. This class-tested feature, introduced in the Second Edition, is back by popular demand with added essays by D. C. Allen, Robert A. Brinldey, Ronald P.Bond, Anne Lake Prescott, Andrew D. Weiner, Susanne Lindgren Wofford, Harry Berger, Jr., and Paul Alpers.

A chronology of Spenscr's life and an extensive bibliography are included.

Preface to the Third Edition

The Texts of the Poems

 The Faerie Queene

A Letter of the Authors

Book Ⅰ

From Book Ⅱ

Book Ⅲ

From Book IV

From Book V

From Book VI

Two Cantos of Mutabilitie

Editors' Note

 From The Shepheardes Calender

To His Booke

["E.K."] ~ [Dedicatory Epistle to The Shepheardes Calender]

Januarye

Febmarie

Aprill

October

November

December

[Envoy]

Editors' Note

 Muiopotmos: or The Fate of the Butterflie

Editors' Note

 Colin Clouts Come Home Againe

Editors' Note

 Amoretti and Epithalamion

Amoretti

[Anacreonticsl

Epithalamion

Editors' Note

 Prothalamion

Editors' Note

 Textual Notes

Criticism

 EARLY CRITICAL VIEWS

William Camden ·[The Death of Spenserl

John Hughes ·[Remarks on The Faerie Queene and The Shepheardes Calender]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge·[Spenser's Art]

 TWENTIETH-CENTURY CRITICISM

Virginia Woolf·The Faery Queen

Richard Helgerson ·[The New Poet Presents Himself]

Louis Adrian Montrose ·[The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text]

A. Bartlett Giamatti·Pageant, Show, and Verse

Thomas P. Roche, Jr. ·[The Elizabethan Idea of Allegory]

Northrop Frye·The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene

A. C. Hamilton ·[The Cosmic Image: Spenser and Dante]

Judith H. Anderson ·"A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine": The Chaucerian Connection

S. K. Heninger, Jr. ·[Orgoglio]

Readings of the House of Busyrane

 Thomas P. Roche, Jr.: [Love, Lust, and Sexuality]

 A. Kent Hieatt: [Sexual Adventurism]

 Susanne Lindgren Wofford: [The Bold Reader in the House of Busyrane1

Humphrey Tonkin ·[Pastorella and the Graces]

David Lee Miller ·Spenser and the Gaze of Glory

Donald Cheney ·The Titaness Put Down

Views of Pastoral

 Isabel MacCaffrey: [The Shepheardes Calender]

 Harry Berger, Jr.: ["The Paradise Principle":

  Approaches to The Shepheardes Calender]

 Paul Alpers: [Spenser's Domain of Lyric]

Muiopotmos: A Mini-Casebook

 D. C. Allen: [The Butterfly-Soul]

 Ronald B. Bond: [The Workings of Envy]

 Robert A. Brinkley: [The Politics of Metamorphosis]

 Andrew D. Weiner: [Butterflies, Men, and the

  Narrator in Muiopotmos]

Amoretti

 Louis Martz: [Amoretti]

 Anne Lake Prescott: [Allegorical Deer and Amoretti 67]

William Nelson · [Hobgoblin and Apollo's Garland]

A Chronology of Spenser's Life

Selected Bibliography