Iambicum Trimetrum

Along with his contemporary Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser is one of the most important literary figures from the English Renaissance (c. 1550-1660), also known as the Early Modern Period. Spenser’s work was greatly influenced by his studies of Classical and Italian Renaissance poets, including Virgil, Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso. His faith and study of Christianity also informed his work. With Sidney, who was also an influence, and his friend Gabriel Harvey, Spenser belonged to a literary circle called “Areopagus.” Though the group’s formation was short-lived, its members were prolific, later publishing sonnets and epithalamiums, as well as pastoral poems and romantic epics.

Spenser’s impact during this period is especially significant considering his experiments with form. Though he was guided by Classical poets, his verse was not constrained by precedent. In his effort to make English literature as sophisticated and worldly as the literature that emerged from Renaissance Italy in the 15th century, Spenser changed conventions within English prosody. For The Faerie Queene (1590), he invented the nine-line stanza. This device, known as the Spenserian stanza, was later imitated by the Romantic poets

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