Edmund Spenser
Quick answer: Edmund Spenser craft guide: the Spenserian stanza, allegory and deliberate word-music of The Faerie Queene, and what modern poets can take from them.
Spenser built a stanza so distinctive it still carries his name, and poets as different as Keats, Shelley and Byron borrowed it centuries later. Nine lines, interlocking rhymes, and a long final line that slows every stanza to a ceremonial close: it is one of the great pieces of formal engineering in English.
He is also the canon's most committed allegorist. The Faerie Queene runs its knights and monsters on two tracks at once, adventure story and moral argument, which makes him surprisingly useful to any modern poet writing about one thing by way of another.
The poem
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
Edmund Spenser, 'Amoretti 75' (1595)
Who Spenser was
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-1599) was an Elizabethan poet and colonial administrator in Ireland. His major works are The Shepheardes Calender, a sequence of pastoral poems for the twelve months, The Faerie Queene, his vast unfinished allegorical epic, and the sonnet sequence Amoretti with its companion wedding poem Epithalamion.
He matters as the great deliberate stylist of his age: a poet who chose archaic spellings and older words on purpose, building a slightly antique music that signalled his poem's seriousness.
The signature moves
Three techniques repay close study.
What you can learn from him
Try one Spenserian stanza and feel what the alexandrine does: that longer last line forces a summarising or widening gesture, which teaches you to think in stanza-sized units of argument. For allegory, choose a concrete story that can carry your abstract subject, a house move standing for a friendship ending, and keep both levels literal-consistent throughout; the mode fails the moment the story stops making sense on its own terms. And when a poem needs a refrain, let it mutate slightly each time it returns, so repetition measures change instead of merely repeating.
Where to start reading
Do not begin with all six books of the epic.
What poets can take from this
- Write one nine-line stanza rhyming ababbcbc with a longer final line, and note how the ending changes.
- Draft an allegory by writing the surface story first and checking the moral level afterwards.
- Use alliteration in pairs and echoes across lines, not clusters within one line.
- Give any refrain a small variation on each return.
- Read a stanza of The Faerie Queene aloud for the braking effect of the alexandrine.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in which a physical journey through one building, a school, hospital or childhood home, doubles as a journey through one stage of your life, keeping both levels consistent.
Questions
What is a Spenserian stanza?
A nine-line stanza rhyming ababbcbc c: eight iambic pentameter lines closed by a longer alexandrine. Spenser devised it for The Faerie Queene, and Keats, Shelley and Byron later reused it.
Is The Faerie Queene finished?
No. Spenser planned twelve books but completed six, plus fragments. Book 1 stands well on its own and is the usual starting point.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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