In p>1579, Spencer published the pastoral poem "The Shepherd's Calendar", which was a success and was gradually valued. In 158, he was sent to Ireland to hold an official position, settled in the quiet Jill Colmont, and wrote the first three volumes of the famous poem The Fairy Queen. Sir Walter Riley, who came to visit, greatly praised this work and encouraged him to publish it. Spencer accepted his friend's suggestion and returned to London the following year to read these three volumes of poems to Elizabeth and then publish them. He thought that these poems praising the queen would definitely open the way for him to enter the court, but the queen paid him very little, and he returned to Ireland in disappointment. Soon, he used the pastoral genre of the Shepherd's Calendar to write a poem "Colleen Clout came home again", describing his various situations in London.
In the next few years, Spencer was busy with love and marriage, and continued to write poems. He came to London again in 1596, published the last three volumes of The Fairy Queen, and wrote four poems, such as Ode to Heaven's Love and Ode to Heaven's Beauty. In 1598, shortly after Spencer returned from London, the Irish people's uprising against English slaves broke out. Spencer's private residence of Jill Colmont was burned, and one of his children was also buried in the fire cave, so he had to flee to London with his family. At this time, some of his friends in London were arrested for their crimes, and some of them had died. Spencer, who was physically and mentally haggard, fell into a situation where there was no way to call. He died in extreme hardship in 1599.
The Shepherd's Calendar is the first work that made Spencer famous. This pastoral poem includes 12 pastoral poems, and each capital is titled as a month of the year. This work mainly describes love and rural natural scenery, but also involves religious, political and moral issues. In his works, the poet praised Queen Elizabeth as an upright and kind monarch, affirmed his ideals about society and ethics, and described real life in the form of whitewashing ideals. The shepherds described by the poet know history, literature and ancient Greek and Roman mythology, unlike real shepherds.
Spencer wrote a lot of lyric poems in his life, among which the sonnet Love Poem (1591-1595) was the most outstanding. There are 89 poems in this poetry group, which are used to praise a woman named Elizabeth. It is impossible to find out who this woman refers to. He also wrote two marriage carols, After Marriage Song (1591~1595) and Before Marriage Song (1596). The former describes the poet's own love life, while the latter is a congratulatory poem for the marriage of the two daughters of Count Leicester. These lyric poems are mixed with scenes and have beautiful rhythm.
The Fairy Queen (1589, 1596) is Spencer's most important and successful work and the first national epic of the British bourgeoisie. Together with Zhang Yang's Pilgrim's Progress and Dante's Divine Comedy, it is called the three fables in world literature. This long poem was originally planned to be written in 12 volumes, but only 6 volumes were completed. The long poem began to write about the scene of Gloriana's palace festival banquet after the fairy queen, and then described the process of the court warriors fighting monsters and wizards. The work eulogizes Queen Elizabeth in the name of describing the fairy queen, and promotes the qualities that new bourgeois should possess. In the completed six volumes of stories, the samurai heroes are all written as symbols of certain moral qualities. For example, Prince Arthur is written as the embodiment of the highest human character, the Red Cross warrior is a sacred symbol, Buzhentoma is a model of chastity, and Carido is a model of politeness.
The Fairy Queen expresses the author's humanistic ideal and summarizes the characteristics of the Renaissance. In art, it inherited the legendary knight literature and was also influenced by the artistic style of Italian poet Aglio Stowe in the Renaissance, which provided the highest example of poetry creation skills for Britain at that time. This work has perfect poetic style, beautiful language and rich musical beauty, and was later called "Spencer Style", which had a great influence on the formation of English poetic meter. Spencer was once known as a "poet's poet", and his works had a good effect on all poetry creation at that time. Later poets, especially the romantic poets Byron and Shelley in the early 19th century, also learned a lot from his works.