one of the great long poems in the English language, written in the 16th century by Edmund Spenser. As originally conceived, the poem was to have been a religious-moral-political allegory in 12 books, each consisting of the adventures of a knight representing a particular moral virtue; Book I, for example, recounts the legend of the Red Cross Knight, or Holiness. The knights serve the Faerie Queene, who represents Glory and Queen Elizabeth I. The first installment of the poem (Books I–III) was published in 1590; the second (Books IV–VI), in 1596. The first folio edition appeared in 1609.

The poem derives its form from the Italian romance—for example, in the division into books and cantos and the inventive energy of the entrelacement (the continually bifurcating and infolded narrative). The poem is written in what came to be known as the Spenserian stanza: (Spenserian stanza) eight lines of 10 syllables followed by one 12-syllable line, rhyming ababbcbcc.