Edmund Spenser

Spenser worked much of his career as a colonial administrator in Ireland, serving successive English governors and eventually acquiring an estate at Kilcolman, where he wrote most of The Faerie Queene amid a brutal ongoing English campaign against Irish resistance that he also defended in a prose tract.

The poem, dedicated to Elizabeth I and left unfinished at six of a planned twelve books, sends allegorical knights on quests representing virtues (the Redcrosse Knight for Holiness, Britomart for Chastity) through a deliberately archaic, Chaucer-inflected English built to evoke medieval romance even as it flattered a very Tudor political program.

Irish rebels burned Kilcolman Castle in 1598; Spenser fled to London and died there within months, reportedly in poverty, though later tradition made his funeral a gathering of England's greatest poets.