Thomas Sackville was by no means a prolific poet. Only four of his poems have survived and one of those was only very recently discovered. Yet Sackville's fellows and followers in the art of poetry were in no doubt as to the quality and importance of his work. Edmund Spenser himself, the arch-poet of Elizabethan England, praised Sackville's "golden verses." Spenser was particularly impressed by Sackville's "Induction," one of the two poems he contributed to the second edition of William Baldwin's compilation A Mirror for Magistrates in 1563, and this is the poem that is best known and most appreciated even today as "one of the first truly great Elizabethan poems," according to scholar Alan T. Bradford.

Sackville was born in 1536 in the Sussex village of Buckhurst, from which he took the title Baron Buckhurst when Elizabeth raised him to the peerage in 1567. On that occasion she described him...