Edmund Spenser

Edmund Spenser was a London tradesman’s son who went to Cambridge as a sizar, entered the household of Leicester, and spent most of his adult life in Ireland as a colonial official, where he wrote The Faerie Queene on a confiscated estate and fled when the estate was burned in the rising of 1598, dying in London within months. The poem, six books of a planned twelve, is an allegory of the virtues in the form of chivalric romance, in a stanza he invented. Epithalamion celebrates his own wedding; Prothalamion another’s. Milton called him a better teacher than Aquinas.