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
Henry King, born on 16 January 1592 and dead on 30 September 1669, lived a life shaped by inherited ecclesiastical ambition, private bereavement, literary friendship, civil conflict, and religious restoration. He is remembered chiefly as the author of “The Exequy,” one of the most moving elegies in seventeenth-century English poetry, but that single poem can obscure the breadth of his career. King was a clergyman, ro…
Neighbourhood:
Cavalier Poets, Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
