Spenser had been both a poet and a Puritan: he had designed to show by his great poem the training and fashioning of a Puritan English gentleman.

But the alliance between poetry and Puritanism which he typified failed to survive his death.

The essentially pagan spirit of the Renaissance which caused him no doubts nor difficulties proved too strong for his readers and his followers, and the emancipated artistic enthusiasm in which it worked alienated from secular poetry men with deep and strong religious convictions.
Religion and morality and poetry, which in Sidney and Spenser had gone hand in hand, separated from each other.

Poems like _Venus and Adonis_ or like Shakespeare's sonnets could hardly be squared with the sterner temper which persecution began to breed.

Even within orthodox Anglicanism poetry and religion began to be deemed no fit company for each other.