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…
“I labour to pourtraict in Arthur, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private moral virtues.”
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Irish Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness
John Reynolds, born about 1588 and believed to have died about 1655, was one of the most industrious and revealing English writers of the Stuart age. He was never a canonical figure in the manner of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, or John Milton, and the details of his private life are far less securely recorded than those of such celebrated contemporaries. Yet Reynolds deserves attention precisely becau…
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Joy, Tenderness
