Edmund Spenser planned twelve books of allegorical romance celebrating twelve virtues; he completed six and part of a seventh. Knights battle dragons, enchantresses, and despair itself in a landscape where every character and location carries symbolic meaning. The stanza form Spenser invented moves with dream-like fluidity, and the poem influenced Milton, Keats, and Tennyson. Reading it requires surrender to its rhythms and its belief that virtue can be made visible. Few readers finish it. Those who do find it inexhaustible.