Poetry written during the Renaissance, especially the English Renaissance of the 16th and early 17th centuries, when poets drew on classical learning, humanist ideas, and new experiments in form. It includes the work of writers such as Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, and Milton.
The term names a historical period rather than a single style, so Renaissance poetry can range from courtly sonnets and pastoral lyrics to devotional verse and long narrative poems.
Example
When April brightened garden walls,
I praised the rose, then weighed its fall;
The world's short beauty, set in rhyme,
Spoke of both glory and of time.