argument, a particular one to each part; he appended to
every poem a 'glosse' explaining words and allusions.
The work is dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. It was
published in the winter of 1579-80.
More than once in the course of it, Spenser refers
to Tityrus as his great master. The twelfth eclogue
opens thus:

The gentle shepheard sat beside a springe
All in the shadow of a bushye brere,
That Colin height, which well could pype and singe,
For hee of Tityrus his songs did lere.

Tityrus, on E.K.'s authority, was Chaucer. It is
evident from the language--both the words and verbal
forms--used in this poem that Spenser had zealously
studied Chaucer, whose greatest work had appeared just
about two centuries before Spenser's first important
publication. The work, however, in which he imitates
Chaucer's manner is not the _Shepheardes Calendar_, but
his _Prosopopoia or Mother Hubberds Tale_, which he
says, writing in a later year, he had 'long sithens
composed in the raw conceipt of my youth.' The form
and manner of the _Shepheardes Calendar_ reflected not
Chaucer's influence upon the writer, but the influence
of a vast event which had changed the face of
literature since the out-coming of the _Canterbury
Tales_--of the revival of learning. That event had put
fresh models before men, had greatly modified old
literary forms, had originated new. The classical