Edmund Spenser

Born around 1552 in London, Edmund Spenser became one of the most important poets of the English Renaissance. He studied at the Merchant Taylors' School and Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and went on to build a literary reputation during the reign of Elizabeth I.

His best-known work, The Faerie Queene, is a vast unfinished epic that combines chivalric adventure with moral and political allegory. He also wrote The Shepheardes Calender, the sonnet sequence Amoretti, and Epithalamion, and his experiments with verse gave English literature the Spenserian stanza and the Spenserian sonnet.

Spenser spent part of his later life in Ireland, where he held government posts while continuing to write. He died in 1599, but his influence lasted for centuries, reaching poets from Milton and Keats to Tennyson and beyond.