Edumund Spenser was (and is) called "the poet's poet" because of the very high quality of his poetry and because he enjoyed "the pure artistry of his craft" so much.  He is also called that because so many other poets thought that he was a great poet.

Some of the great poets who admired him include John Milton (who wrote Paradise Lost), John Dryden, John Keats (perhaps most famous for "Ode on a Grecian Urn") and William Wordsworth (famous for his romantic poetry such as "The World is Too Much with Us").

Much of their praise is for his unfinished masterpiece entitled The Faerie Queene.

Who named Edmund Spenser the "poet's poet"?

Edmund Spenser was first called the "Poet's Poet" by the English essayist Charles Lamb. Although the phrase does not appear in any of Lamb's writings, Leigh Hunt attributes it to him in his critique of Spenser in Hunt's book Imagination and Fancy (published in 1844), which is an anthology of English poetry with accompanying commentary.

In his book The Allegory of Love, C. S. Lewis explained the reasoning behind Lamb's title for Spenser by noting that he is "so called in virtue of the historical fact that most of the poets have liked him very much." However, Lewis was not particularly fond of labeling anyone as the best or greatest of poets. In his opinion, it caused "incalculable damage" to the poet because readers expected him to always produce great poetry.

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