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Edmund Spenser

Edmund Spenser

c. 1552 CEc. 1599 CE · Poet · East Smithfield, London

Edmund Spenser was an English poet of the Elizabethan era, best known for The Faerie Queene, an unfinished allegorical epic in a distinctive nine-line stanza he devised. Born in London around 1552, he was educated at the Merchant Taylors' School and Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. His pastoral sequence The Shepheardes Calender (1579) established his reputation, followed by the sonnet cycle Amoretti and the wedding ode Epithalamion. From 1580 he served in the English administration in Ireland, later settling at Kilcolman Castle in County Cork. He also wrote the prose tract A View of the Present State of Ireland. He died in Westminster in January 1599 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

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East Smithfield, London

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