The Faerie Queene

Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667)

Edmund Spenser inspired John Milton, and his epic poem, Paradise Lost, has much in common with The Faerie Queene. Milton, too, wishes to instruct and educate readers. Milton’s main subject is God, so he turns God, Satan, Adam, and Eve into a story or adversarial journey. As with Spenser’s speaker, Milton’s speaker is prominent and vocal. Both poems glorify years past, with Milton opting to use blank verse to join his poem to classical epics. Similar to Spenser, Milton alludes to historical events of his time, like the English Civil War he witnessed. Later readers—particularly William Blake and other Romantic poets—declared the most visceral parts involved Milton’s multidimensional depiction of Satan. Like Spenser, Milton may have been glorifying the devil or inimical figures unaware.

“The Anniad“ by Gwendolyn Brooks (1949)

Like Edmund Spenser, Gwendolyn Brooks, a Black poet from Chicago, took inspiration from classic epics. In “The Anniad,” Brooks takes Virgil’s The Aeneid and Homer’s The Iliad and adopts them to fit a working-class woman, Annie, in a 20th-century American city. Spenser’s epic has moments of humor, and Brooks’s mock epic, as the genre implies, has quite a bit of playfulness.