Edmund Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene, an epic allegory in honour of Elizabeth I. Twelve books were planned; six got written. He died with the poem unfinished.
Born in London around 1552. Cambridge. Secretary to Lord Grey in Ireland, where he witnessed the brutal suppression of a rebellion.
The Shepheardes Calender (1579) was his debut; The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), his chief work. Its knights personify the virtues and wander an allegorical world. Elizabeth I appears as Gloriana.
The Spenserian stanza was his invention: nine lines with a rhyme scheme all its own. Two hundred years later Keats and Byron were still using it.
He died in London in 1599, in poverty, it is thought.
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