With the exception of Chaucer, Miron and Shakespeare, few poets have intluenced the development of English Literature so profoundly as Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). The set of pastoral poems, The Shepheardes Kalendar (1579), made Spenser’s name as a poet and these can stand comparison with the greatest European examples of the genre, while his great, heroic, romantic poem, The Faerie Queene (1591), can justly claim to outshine the continental, chivalric romances of Ariosto and Tasso.

The Augustan Age admired Spenser’s pictorial brilliance while the Romantics regarded him as a poet of dreams and sensuous appeal. Praised in verse by Wordsworth, commended by W.B. Yeats and famously championed by C.S. Lewis, Spenser’s poetry is an essential ingredient in the development of English verse.