Journal Article

Spenser’s Lost Children

Grogan, Jane

2013

Overview

For Irish writers, Spenser has become a nettle to be grasped, a stinging symbol of a fractured Irish history and a fractured literary tradition. But there is opportunity in the grasping. Thus Spenser’s life, as much as his poetry, exerts a significant influence on Irish writers, and not just poets. In Frank McGuinness’s play Mutabilitie (1997), John Montague’s The Rough Field (1972), or in poems by Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, and Brendan Kennelly, certain conspicuously Spenserian topoi dominate: the shocking description of the Munster famine from the View; his poetic professions of loyalty to Elizabeth, the “faerie queene”; the burning of Kilcolman castle. But less conspicuous Spenserian motifs and concerns resurface in unexpected ways in modern Irish writing, often at moments of literary or political crisis, enacting different kinds of concerns. Spenser’s rivers—“Mulla,” “Molanna” and even the “Sweet Thames” of “Prothalamion”—course through Irish writing, sometimes only half-consciously. The apocryphal story of a child of Spenser’s lost while Kilcolman castle burned is another powerful figure to which Irish writers have been drawn, not only as a figure of loss but also of an entente that may already have happened, a hidden history of Anglo-Irish relations that remains to be told. This essay maps Spenser’s influence on modern Irish poetry, novels, and drama through these figures. It uncovers the literary and political work that direct engagements with Spenser seek to perform, and re-orients Spenser’s place in Irish literary tradition as, paradoxically, a touchstone, even perhaps the “created conscience” of Irish literature.

• Publisher: The University of Chicago Press,University of Chicago Press
• Subject: British & Irish literature / Carson, Ciaran / Children / Heaney, Seamus / Irish literature / Kennelly, Brendan / Literary influences / McGuinness, Frank / Montague, John / Narrative theme / Novels / Poetry / Spenser, Edmund (1552?-1599) / Writers / Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939)