Shakespeare

[Achebe]

Are you kidding?  Spenser is FUCKING AWFUL! So tortured and with his tongue quite firmly rimming the Queen.  

Exhortations of Irish genocide notwithstanding, I'd do him in for the bloody Alexandrines alone.

From memory, Canto III of the Faerie Queene:-

But if in liuing colore and right hue
your selfe you couet to see pictured
who can do it rightly or more true
than that sweete verse with nectared sprinkled
in which a gracious servant pictured
his Cynthai, his heauen's fairest light?
that with his melting sweetnesse rauished
and with the wonder of her beams bright
my senses are lulled in slomber of delight.

Isn't the 'slomber of delight' louelie?
It's tempting to say that he's remembered for a refrain, but it's more than that. The Faeirie Queene is lyrical. And a long rhyming poem in English is a feat, given how rhyme poor the language is.
He did preside over certain unfortunates in his estate, but in the long run it's things like that that made the Irish people strong and able to massacre in turn, the  natives of New Holland, for their water view quarter acre blocks?