Overview

First published in 1971, Edmund Spenser presents a comprehensive overview of Spencer's work, including the minor poems and the prose View of Ireland. There are chapters on the Shepheardes Calendar, the Complaints poems, the great love and religious poetry of 1595-6 and The Faerie Queene. The author illustrates the range of Spencer's imaginative and poetic skills in pastoral, elegy, lyric, satire, sonnet, ode, epithalamium, religious ode and epic, and shows why he was the most popular of Elizabethan poets. This is a must read for scholars of English literature in English poetry.