文学百科 The Literature Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained)
After, 1668. Jean de La Fontaine adapts his collection of fables from classical sources, including Aesop and Phaedrus, stretching the metrical verse of the time.
That suggests that he didn't have time to compose highly structured passages using iambic pentameter or some other meter, or passages using rhyming verse.
Whatever vein he writes in—pious, courtly, satirical, cynical, or merely abusive—he is always the artist, with an artist's delight in language and meter for their own sakes.
Recognized by his contemporaries as the foremost poet of his time, Spenser was not only a master of meter and language but a profound moral poet as well.
The most famous example is Spenser's Epithalamion, whose long stanzas did play an astonishing metrical complexity, fairly illustrating the height of Elizabethan craft in verse.