Edmund Spenser's 'The Faerie Queene' — The Allegorical Castle
Poet involved
What happened
Edmund Spenser published the first three books of The Faerie Queene in 1590, dedicating the poem to Elizabeth I and describing it as a moral allegory in the tradition of Ariosto and Tasso. The poem is saturated with castles — the House of Pride, the Castle of Temperance, Orgoglio's dungeon, the House of Holiness — each representing a moral or spiritual condition through which its questing knights must pass. Spenser's allegorical use of the castle was the most elaborate in the English poetic tradition.
Literary impact
The Faerie Queene established the allegorical castle as a major vehicle for moral and political poetry in English, shaping Milton's use of architectural allegory in Paradise Lost (where Hell itself is described as a vast fortification), Bunyan's House Beautiful and Doubting Castle in Pilgrim's Progress, and the Gothic castle of later fiction. Every subsequent English poet who used castle imagery as moral allegory — from Milton to Keats to C. S. Lewis — was working within a framework Spenser had elaborated.
Source: Wikipedia
