Edmund Spenser: A Life is the first biography of the most important poet of the English Renaissance for sixty years. Spenser is best known as the author of The Faerie Queene, but he is arguably the most innovative and experimental poet writing in English before the twentieth century and his great achievement has overshadowed the range, volume and quality of his work in The Shepheardes Calender, The Complaints, and The Amoretti and Epithalamion, as well as the notorious View of the Present State of Ireland, a work which still has the power to shock readers. Spenser’s life invariably informs his poetry and tells us not just about his character and actions but about the complicated and fractious times in which he lived. He spent the second half of his relatively brief life (1554-99) in Ireland, where he amassed a substantial fortune but at the cost of his security and happiness. Spenser was buried in Westminster Abbey next to Chaucer, a decision that established what we now know as ‘Poet’s Corner.