Faerie Queen Selections (Everyman's Library)

From the Introduction by Douglas Brooks-Davies: Spenser's Faerie Queene stands as one of the great humanistic landmarks in the English poetic renaissance. Its style is at once eloquent and simple, and yet through it we encounter all the excitement and complexity of the late Elizabethan period. Spenser saw himself as Elizabeth I's epic poet, writing of his queen's imperial and religious supremacy, aware that earthly things are constantly subject to decay and corruption but that the Elizabethan court could be an image of an ideal, other-worldly existence. . . .