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The Faerie Queene
The Faerie Queene
, by Edmund Spenser, is an example of a fun poem.

It is fun because its topic is fantasy: It has nothing whatsoever to do with reality.

Even in computer science, there was a common rule that there was an inverse relation between how interesting that a topic was and how useful that it was: Generally speaking, the more interesting the topic, the less useful that it was.

This rule also applies to poetry. The most fun poems, such as The Faerie Queene, and the most fun comedies, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream (by William Shakespeare), are almost always those that concerned high fantasy.

The Faerie Queene is a story featuring an evil wizard, an evil dragon, a young lady, and a knight. It is rich in poetic allegory. It forces the reader to understand symbolism. It is the epitome of high fantasy for poetry.

For example, here is a summary of Book I of the epic poem from the related Wikipedia article:

> Book I is centred on the virtue of Holiness as embodied in the
> Redcrosse Knight. He and his lady Una travel together as he fights the
> dragon Errour, then separate as the wizard Archimago tricks the
> Redcrosse Knight in a dream to think that Una is unchaste. After he
> leaves, the Redcrosse Knight meets Duessa, who feigns distress in order
> to entrap him. Duessa leads the Redcrosse Knight to captivity by the
> giant Orgoglio. Meanwhile, Una overcomes peril, meets Arthur, and
> finally finds the Redcrosse Knight and rescues him from his capture,
> from Duessa, and from Despair. Una and Arthur help the Redcrosse
> Knight recover in the House of Holiness, with the House's ruler Caelia
> and her three daughters joining them; there the Redcrosse Knight sees a
> vision of his future. He then returns Una to her parents' castle and
> rescues them from a dragon, and the two are betrothed after resisting
> Archimago one last time.

The Faerie Queene was one of my favorite poems in college, and the only poem that I actually found to be fun to read. It reminded me of the plot of one fantasy-based role-playing game that had captivated my interest in my teenage years: Dragon Quest III (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Quest_III), created by Yuuji Horii (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuji_Horii).

Both plots featured either a wizard or wizards, a dragon or dragons, a young lady or ladies, and a knight or a knight-like person of courage. Both plots depicted the protagonist in an epic struggle. And both plots had a protracted series of quest-like events.

Most importantly, both plots were immersive: They had the quality of being able to cast the reader (or the player) into a high fantasy universe devoid of any relation whatsoever to reality. That was precisely the reason that they were both fun.

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Benjamin L. Russell

May 2020

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