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…
“To some I know this method will seem displeasing, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large.”
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Irish Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness
Phineas Fletcher, baptized on 8 April 1582 and buried in December 1650, was one of the most ambitious English poets of the generation after Edmund Spenser. He lived through the last decades of Elizabeth I, the reigns of James I and Charles I, and the early upheavals of the Civil War, yet his own life was comparatively quiet: he was a scholar, priest, husband, father, country rector, and author. His reputation has nev…
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Nature Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Despair, Longing
