Edmund Spenser, born about 1552 and dead on 13 January 1599, was the most ambitious English poet of the later Elizabethan age and one of the chief architects of the English literary canon. His achievement rests above all on The Faerie Queene, the vast unfinished romance-epic through which he attempted to give Protestant England a national mythology, a moral education, and a poetic language equal to those of classical…
“By the person of Prince Arthur I understand Magnificence in general, which virtue, I take to be the perfection of all the rest.”
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Irish Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness
In the annals of English literature, few figures burn as brightly and briefly as Christopher Marlowe. Born in the same year as William Shakespeare, 1564, Marlowe’s life was a meteoric flash that illuminated the Elizabethan stage before being extinguished in a tavern brawl at the age of twenty-nine. Yet, in those scant three decades, he fundamentally altered the trajectory of English drama, liberating it from the stif…
“O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Tenderness, Wonder
