Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) has been called the greatest nondramatic poet of the Elizabethan Era. Born in London to a family of meager means, he attended Merchant Taylor's School and then Cambridge University. Later he became aide and secretary to several important men. In one of their households, he met courtier and poet Sir Philip Sidney, to whom he dedicated The Shepheardes Calender, a series of pastoral poems.

Spenser went to Ireland as aide to Lord Grey of Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland, and tried unsuccessfully for the rest of his life to return to England to live. Staunchly nationalistic and Protestant, he wrote an apology for British colonial repression of the Irish called A View of the Present State of Ireland. In the last decade of the 1500s, a bitter rebellion broke out in Ireland, and Spenser's castle was demolished. Spenser died while on a mission back to England and was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.