sonnets

Today, we’ll meet Mr. Thomas Carew, born in Kent in 1594 or ‘95, the youngest of three children. His early life had its ups and downs - as a young man, he meant to follow his father’s career path into law, but he studied little and that was a dead-end. He was hired into secretarial roles to diplomats in Italy and France, but shot himself in the foot by writing too frankly of a patron’s faults.

No, I didn’t forget about my goal of making a hundred friends by memorising their poems. I just took a break to reconsider the feasibility of this project, but have decided to go forward. So, today we meet Edmund Spenser. You know Mr. Spenser, right? He was born in 1552 or 1553, the son of a journeyman clothmaker, went to Pembroke College but required financial assistance to do so (apparently, doing menial work for the college), and as an adult spent much of his career as a government official in Ireland.