Edmund Spenser

Dubbed a Poet’s Poet and instantly interred in the Poets' Corner, Edmund Spenser is one of the most influential and important poets in the English language. He is primarily known for The Faerie Queene, the longest epic poem in English, which can be read on a plethora of levels. Spenser invented the Spenserian stanza and only John Keats in The Eve of St. Agnes and Percy Bysshe Shelley in his elegy to Keats – Adonais – have been able to produce long poems of Spenserian stanzas with equal levels of poetic power.

Spenser wrote in a language that looks like Middle English, but is pronounced like modern English. Spenser has been read, imitated, studied, and taught essentially since his death in 1599.