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…
“The general end therefore of all the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Irish Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness
John Bennet, born probably around 1575 and last securely active in 1614, occupies a distinctive if elusive place in the cultural history of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. He is frequently described as a poet because his finest music is inseparable from the language it sets, but the surviving evidence identifies him principally as a composer: a writer of madrigals and psalm settings whose art depended upon an excep…
Neighbourhood:
Lute-Song Composers, Poet-Musicians, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
