Spenser's Famous Flight A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career

Spenser begins his literary career with pastoral in The Shepheardes Calender and follows with the first instalment of his epic The Faerie Queene, but then inserts the Petrarchan love lyric, represented by Amoretti and Epithalamion, as a genre of renewal so that he can continue his epic; and eventually he turns from these courtly forms to a contemplative one, the Augustinian-based Fowre Hymnes.