After the Mutabilitie Cantos: Yeats and Heaney Reading Spenser

When Yeats first turned to Spenser in a professional way, it was a chance opportunity to generate some income. ‘It is good pay,’ he wrote to his friend, Lady Augusta Gregory, and ‘I may do it if I have not to do it at once. I have a good deal to say about Spenser but tremble at the thought of reading his six books.’ He was writing of the invitation he had just received from an Edinburgh publisher to select and introduce Spenser’s poetry for their ‘Golden Poets’ series. That close encounter, when in due course it ensued, was to provide Yeats with several crucial things that he didn’t yet know he was looking for. What he ultimately found in Spenser was a potent model of Irish poetry in English in Ireland, a Protestant poetic progenitor and with it, an originary tradition for his own poetry.