What are some features of Elizabethan poetry?

In the
Elizabethan period (from the start of Elizabeth I's reign in 1558 until her death in 1603) we
find a wide diversity of English poets, each with his own individualistic personality and
literary style. It would be best, in answering your question, for us to single out several of
these writers, note the chief characteristics of their work, and draw conclusions as to common
threads or themes among them that exist despite each one's singularity.

Edmund Spenser (1552€“1599). Spenser is known principally
for his great epic The Fairie Queene, for his love sonnets, and forpoems
such as The Shephearde's Calender and hisAstrophel on
his fellow poet Philip Sidney. In all of these works Spenser used beautifully stylized and
musical language to evoke a quasi-mythic past and to recreate the courtlyof the Middle Ages.
Much of the wording he uses was already archaic in his own time, and this serves to emphasize
the gentle, almost nostalgic quality of his verse in depicting an idealized England, while using
the past allegorically to celebrate his own sovereign Queen Elizabeth.

William Shakespeare (1564€“1616). As probably the greatest
of all English poets and the greatest world dramatist of modern (i.e., since the year 1500)
times, Shakespeare does not need much description from us. His best-known verse apart from the
plays is, of course, the sonnets, which are basically love poetry but written in a more
down-to-earth and "realistic" tone than the sonnets of Spenser. The sonnet was
originally an Italian verse form, so Spenser, Shakespeare, and other English poets were basing
their work on Italian models to a large degree, just as Shakespeare drew on Italian sources for
many of his plays. Inspiration from Italy was a major feature of the Elizabethan age.

Christopher Marlowe (1564€“1593). Like Shakespeare,
Marlowe was mainly a dramatist, although his life was cut short before he could fulfill the
enormous promise of his talent. His most famous work apart from the plays is probably the
pastoral poem, "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love." Marlowe's language in some
heightened spots could be considered as beautiful as Shakespeare's in his passages celebrating
love, such as the lines beginning "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?"
from Doctor Faustus.

Philip Sidney
(1554-1586). A soldier and prominent courtier as well as a poet, Sidney died
young, in this case on the battlefield fighting on the side of the Protestants in the
Netherlands against the Spanish. Sidney wrote love sonnets and the long pastoral poem
Astrophel and Stella (hence Spenser's poem Astrophel,
which is about Sidney himself after his death). He also wrote a long critical essay
about the aesthetics of literature, A Defence of .

Among
all of the above the common threads can be seen as: 1) the emphasis on love, 2) the use of
Italian models such as the sonnet and sources such as the Italian romance, 3) the popularity of
pastoral verse, dealing with a world of shepherds and shepherdesses, and 4) depictions of a
courtly, legendary past (as in Spenser), often in an either allegorical or nationalistically
idealized format where Queen Elizabeth, the rise of the Tudor family (as in Shakespeare's
Richard III) or the greatness of the English in general are celebrated. In
this last point we can also sense a growing awareness of the importance of England as a world
power and the English as a people who are beginning to create significant literature that can
equal the poetry of the Romance-language nations and of antiquity.