Spenser, Edmund
Spenser, Edmund (c.1552–99),poet. Spenser spent most of his life in Ireland following his appointment in 1580 as secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton, the Lord Deputy of Ireland. Only after Tyrone's rebellion of 1598 destroyed his home did Spenser return to England. His reputation for poetry did not prevent him from dying in poverty there.
After graduating from Cambridge, Spenser published his first major work, The Shepheardes Calendar, a series of twelve pastoral eclogues (1579). He subsequently wrote in various genres: elegy (Astrophel), the sonnet sequence (Amoretti), the pastoral (Colin Clout's Come Home Again), the ‘Epithalamion’, and ‘Prothalamion’, all published in 1595 except for the last named in 1596. But the work which occupied him for the whole of his life (and which he would never complete) was his epic poem The Faerie Queene. In 1590, Spenser returned from Ireland to...
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