Italian poetry also fed the genius of Edmund Spenser (1552-1599).  While a student at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, he had translated some of the Visions of Petrarch, and the Visions of Bellay, a French poet, but it was only in 1579 that the publication of his Shepheard’s Calendar announced the coming of a great original poet, the first since Chaucer.  The Shepheard’s Calendar was a pastoral in twelve eclogues—­one for each month in the year.  There had been a revival of pastoral poetry in Italy and France, but, with one or two insignificant exceptions, Spenser’s were the first bucolics in English.  Two of his eclogues were paraphrases from Clement Marot, a French Protestant poet, whose psalms were greatly in fashion at the court of Francis I. The pastoral machinery had been used by Vergil and by his modern imitators, not merely to portray the loves of Strephon and Chloe, or the idyllic charms of rustic life; but also as a vehicle of compliment, elegy, satire, and personal allusion of many kinds.  Spenser, accordingly, alluded to his friends, Sidney and Harvey, as the shepherds Astrophel and Hobbinol; paid court to Queen Elizabeth as Cynthia; and introduced, in the form of anagrams, names of the High-Church Bishop of London, Aylmer, and the Low-Church Archbishop Grindal.  The conventional pastoral is a somewhat delicate exotic in English poetry, and represents a very unreal Arcadia.  Before the end of the 17th century the squeak of the oaten pipe had become a burden, and the only poem of the kind which it is easy to read without some impatience is Milton’s wonderful Lycidas.  The Shepheard’s Calendar, however, though it belonged to an artificial order of literature, had the unmistakable stamp of genius in its style.  There was a broad, easy mastery of the resources of language, a grace, fluency, and music which were new to English poetry.  It was written while Spenser was in service with the Earl of Leicester, and enjoying the friendship of his nephew, the all-accomplished Sidney and it was, perhaps, composed at the latter’s country seat of Penshurst.  In the following year Spenser went to Ireland as private secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, who had just been appointed Lord Deputy of that kingdom.  After filling several clerkships in the Irish government, Spenser received a grant of the castle and estate of Kilcolman, a part of the forfeited lands of the rebel Earl of Desmond.  Here, among landscapes richly wooded, like the scenery of his own fairy land, “under the cooly shades of the green alders by the Mulla’s shore,” Sir Walter Raleigh found him, in 1589, busy upon his Faerie Queene.  In his poem, Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, Spenser tells, in pastoral language, how “the shepherd of the ocean” persuaded him to go to London, where he presented him to the queen, under whose patronage the first three books of his great poem were printed, in 1590.  A volume of minor poems, entitled Complaints, followed in 1591, and the three remaining books of the Faerie Queene in 1596.  In 1595-1596 he published also his Daphnaida, Prothalamion, and the four hymns on Love and Beauty, and on Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty.  In 1598, in Tyrone’s rebellion, Kilcolman Castle was sacked and burned, and Spenser, with his family, fled to London, where he died in January, 1599.