Edmund Spenser

Biography

Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599) was an English poet regarded as one of the greatest in the language and the foremost poet of the Elizabethan age. His masterwork, The Faerie Queene (1590–96), is the longest and most ambitious poem in English, an allegorical epic celebrating Queen Elizabeth I and the virtues of the ideal Christian knight. Spenser also invented the Spenserian stanza, a nine-line verse form that influenced Keats, Shelley, and Byron. He served as a colonial official in Ireland, where he wrote most of his major work. Spenser was deeply admired by Milton, who called him a "sage and serious" poet, and by the Romantic poets.