Befitting Emblems of Adversity: A Modern Irish View of Edmund Spenser from W. B. Yeats to the Present.

by David Gardiner

In Befitting Emblems of Adversity, David Gardiner investigates the various national contexts in which Edmund Spenser's poetic project has been interpreted and represented by modern Irish poets, from the colonial context of Elizabethan Ireland to Yeats's use of Spenser as an aesthetic and political model to John Montague's reassessment of the reciprocal definitions of the poet and the nation through reference to Spenser. Gardiner also includes analysis of Spenser's influence on Northern Irish poets. And an afterword on the work of Thomas McCarthy, Sean Dunne, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, and others discusses how Montague's reinterpretation of Spenser influenced this most recent generation of Irish poets.

233 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000