Edmund Spenser

Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) was an English poet, born in London and educated at Cambridge. He announced himself with The Shepheardes Calender (1579), a sequence of pastoral eclogues, and in 1580 went to Ireland as secretary to the Lord Deputy, where he acquired an estate at Kilcolman and spent most of the rest of his life. The Faerie Queene, an allegorical epic in praise of Elizabeth I, appeared in two installments in 1590 and 1596, six books of a planned twelve. He also wrote the sonnet sequence Amoretti and the marriage hymn Epithalamion. Driven out by the Irish rebellion of 1598, he died in London the next year.