Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) was a poet best known for The Faerie Queene and memorialised as 'The Prince of Poets in his Tyme'. In this perceptive 1957 essay, Rosemary Freeman argues that 'Whatever changes have taken place in literary taste, and however much Spenser's proposed purposes may since have been neglected or misunderstood, there is in it a supreme poetic quality [...] which is recognised instantly and without reserve'.