Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene — England's national epic
The poets' poet. The Faerie Queene — an allegorical romance in six books glorifying Elizabeth I through Arthurian legend — is the most ambitious poem in English between Chaucer and Milton. The Spenserian stanza he invented for it was used by Byron, Keats, and Shelley.
Key works
- The Faerie Queene1590/1596— Six books of Arthurian allegory — unfinished
- Epithalamion1595— The greatest marriage ode in English