Spenser's colonial poetics

This dissertation examines the impact of Tudor England's imperial expansion on its vernacular poetry. The British empire was a linguistic phenomenon from the outset, Henry VIII having inaugurated England's new status in a series of parliamentary acts and oaths. But this empire, at least during the sixteenth century, was notable mainly by its absence---a grand rhetorical assertion realized in a series of colonial misadventures. Elizabethan England's greatest imperial asset was the visionary ideal itself. "Britain" was still a fiction of future glory; as such, its poets could claim to be agents of this visionary state. The sense of poetry's role in public discourse coincided with the civic humanism current in academic circles, and it is typically to this tradition that literary critics revert. But the emphasis on intellectual history has obscured the extent to which England's colonial ventures contributed to the evolution of a uniquely British poetics. This phenomenon is nowhere so evident as in the poetry of Edmund Spenser, who, as the self-proclaimed Virgil to England's Rome, inspired the likes of Milton a generation later. Spenser spent most of his life as a colonial administrator and planter in Ireland, and eventually settled there permanently. Until recently, this experience has fallen entirely outside the purview of a critical tradition inured to court humanism. Spenser's Irish career has begun to register more forcefully of late, but only as a factor in the poet's representation of national identity; the orthodoxy of court discourse continues to dominate the critical perception of Spenser's poetics. My dissertation addresses this problem by reading Spenser's epic The Faerie Queene in relation to his 'Irish' works, the semi-autobiographical Colin Clouts Come Home Againe and his political chorography A View of the Present State of Ireland . These texts have been maligned as eccentric and even structurally flawed, precisely because they do not fit into the courtly humanist paradigm. Their exclusion from the canon obscures the achievement of Spenser's epic poetics---namely, its celebration of Britain's imperfect present state as an early manifestation of its Providential empire.