a. and sb. [f. the name of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser (? 1552–99) + -IAN.]
A. adj. Of or belonging to, characteristic of, Spenser or his work.
Spenserian stanza, the stanza employed by Spenser in the Faerie Queen, consisting of eight decasyllabic lines and a final Alexandrine, with the rhyming scheme ab ab bc bcc.
1818. Scott, Rob Roy, ii. I … was busy in meditation on the oft-recurring rhymes of the Spenserian stanza.
1853. Ruskin, Stones Ven., II. vii. 273. The Spenserian mingling of this mediæval image … is altogether exquisite.
1890. Hosmer, Anglo-Sax. Freedom, 97. The redoubtable Spenserian giant, Kirkrapine, was a valiant defender of tender Anglicanism.
B. sb. 1. A Spenserian stanza, or a poem in this meter.
1818. Keats, Lett. (1848), I. 133. I see no reason … why I should not have a peep at your Spenserian.
1853. J. Nichol, in Knight, Mem. (1896), ii. 101. I … hope to come nearer it at any rate than in these Spenserians.
1886. Athenæum, 23 Jan., 131/2. Scarcely any poet since Spenser has written entirely successful Spenserians…. Byron … failed altogether in Spenserians.
2. A follower or imitator of Spenser; a poet of Spenser’s school.
1894. Gosse, Jacobean Poets, 47. His [Donne’s] were the first poems which protested, in their form alike and their tendency, against the pastoral sweetness of the Spenserians.
So Spenseric a. [-IC.], Spenserian.
1795. Anna Seward, Lett. (1811), IV. 113. That gay town, which Shenstone, in his Spenseric poem, the Schoolmistress, has so beautifully apostrophized.
