Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is the longest poem in the English language, a vast allegorical epic dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I. Book I follows the Redcrosse Knight on his quest to champion the virtue of Holiness, encountering dragons, enchantresses, and the forces of Error and Despair in a richly imagined landscape drawn from Arthurian legend and Italian Renaissance romance.
Spenser invented a special nine-line stanza for the poem — the Spenserian stanza — that influenced Keats, Byron, and Shelley. This free EPUB presents Book I complete, cleanly formatted for modern readers.