'Befitting emblems of adversity': A modern Irish view of Edmund Spenser from W. B. Yeats to the present

Edmund Spenser, W. B. Yeats, and John Montague all share a common problem: reenvisioning an efficacious role for poets and poetry in moments of cultural and political crisis. By careful analyses of the Irish contexts within which these poets address, and assess, their poetic and political responsibilities, this discussion contributes an understanding of the literature written during the "Spenserian moments" of Anglo-Irish crisis in Elizabethan and modern Ireland.;In his first readings and publications, Yeats presented himself in conspicuous relation to Edmund Spenser. Yeats was particularly attuned to the political potential of Spenser's work. Placing Spenser in relation to the Irish literary tradition presented Yeats with a way to create his role as an Irish poet writing in English. Yeats's role in Irish cultural nationalism was clarified through his revisions of Spenser while Yeats formulated his own status as a Renaissance poet.;The re-emergence of Spenser in contemporary Irish poetry is directly attributable to John Montague, who has repeatedly presented images of the Elizabethans to make sense of the Troubles, which he envisions as growing out of the agendas of both Spenser's Elizabethan and Yeats's Irish Renaissance. Montague's The Rough Field (1972), like Yeats's appropriations of Spenser, registered the consciousness of the national crisis at that time. By situating this discussion within a larger context of Montague's poetic and cultural context, it is demonstrated that the Spenserian poetic, and Yeats's re-interpretation of it, had an enduring attraction for politically-engaged writers in Ireland. This discussion concludes with a reading of recent Cork poets who Montague directly influenced and who have, it seems, radically transformed Spenser in Ireland.;Spenser and his contemporaries formulated an aesthetic Yeats would later present. Spenser's writings provide a "perfect pattern of a poete" which necessitated an art in service to the fictions of the state. Only recently has Spenser studies emerged from the shadow of critics who sought to obscure the connection between Spenser's political and poetic projects. By gathering and contrasting critical representations from Spenser's work with rhetorically similar writings of his contemporaries, this investigation demonstrates that Spenser's poetic was part of a larger cultural program most apparent in situations of cultural and political crisis such as Elizabethan Ireland.