Spenser the poet

[I]ndeed, the study of Spenser's poetry is the best introduction available to the fascinating problem of what there is about poetry that can can bring more poetry into being, for no man has made so many other men into poets as Spenser has.

...Spenser did not allow himself to be inhibited either by the fear that a universal symbolism founded on sacramentalism might betray him into Catholic poetry or that his own fictive covering might obscure the truths of Scriptural revelation. No one else has so cheerfully and astonishingly combined pagan mythology, Christian symbolism, and personal mythmaking while remaining centrally in a main doctrinal tradition of Christianity.

Spenser had the humanist belief that classical thought and poetic form did not conflict with Christian truth; for him all myths merged, as all mirrored a unity of truth. ...Like Sydney, Spenser believed that a poet shared in the creativity of God, and therefore believed also in the poet's responsibility to bring his creation into a meaningful relationship with the moral order of God's creation.

--Harold Bloom, "Introduction to Edmund Spenser," The Best Poems of the English Language

Wow. Oh that someone might could write that about me! I think I need to go read more Spenser now.