Edmund Spenser

Acclaimed by Sir Philip Sidney in his Defense of Poetry, Edmund Spenser was considered to be the greatest of English poets in his days. Using Virgil’s praise of Rome and of the Latin tongue in the Aeneid as an exemple, he glorified England and its language in his most famous piece of work, an unprecedented neoclassical epic in English: The Faerie Queene. He also had a huge influence on the Romantic period.