ABSTRACT
Edmund Spenser is a ‘poet of the delighted senses,’ but of one sense in particular: ‘his genius was pictorial,’ wrote W.B. Yeats.1 The poet who ‘seemed always to feel through his eyes, imagining everything in pictures’ became a nostalgic ideal for Yeats, less a Bloomian ‘strong poet’ than a genial model forebear.2 But for a poet of Yeats’s divided loyalties and Anglocentric ambitions, Spenser needed some tailoring before he could be adopted in this way. The biggest problem was Spenser’s antipathy to the Irish, unmistakable in A View of the Present State of Ireland (1633) but also evident in The Faerie Queene (1590-96).3 Yeats tried to condone it by seeing Spenser as a poet at odds with his many day-jobs within the English administration of Ireland in the late sixteenth century. ‘When Spenser wrote of Ireland he wrote as an official, and out of thoughts and emotions that had been organized by the State … Could he have gone there as a poet merely, he might have found among its poets more wonderful imaginations than even those islands of Phaedria and Acrasia.’4 For Yeats the pernicious connotations of the witch Acrasia and her servant Phaedria are sublimated into the sheer beauty of their discourse; they represent for him a supreme poetic achievement, no matter their dubious moral implications. More strikingly still, in adopting Spenser as a literary forebear he was prepared to countenance a distinction between the secretary and the poet, the politics and the poetry.5 If (as David Gardiner suggests) he ‘grants Spenser an aesthetic reprieve for his political ignorance’ through this casuistical opposition, such a reprieve was out of character for Yeats, a man who sought to generate political impetus precisely by establishing an Irish cultural institution.6
