The Faerie Queene

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The Faerie Queene is an incomplete allegorical poem by Edmund Spenser. As he explains in a letter to Sir Walter Ralegh accompanying the first edition, the aim of the work is "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline" by setting out twelve moral virtues in the narratives of twelve books. For this purpose, the person who connects the twelve books is Prince Arthur, not yet come to his kingdom, but the virtue of each book is set out in the person of a particular knight. Only six of the books were completed and published. These are:

Book I: The knight of the Red Cross, or Holiness
Book II: Sir Guyon, or Temperance
Book III: Britomartis, or Chastity
Book IV: Cambel and Telamond, or Friendship
Book V: Sir Artegall, or Justice
Book VI: Sir Calidore, or Courtesie

Each book has twelve cantos, of varying length. In addition, there are two cantos on mutability, presumably intended as part of a book on Constancy.

The poem is written in the Spenserian stanza.

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