Spenser's Lost Children

This essay gathers together the work of a self-selecting group of Irish poets, novelists and dramatists of the last century who directly confront Spenser and his writing in their own work. It tentatively identifies this engagement with Spenser as a crucial step in their self-conscious construction of–and attempt to enter into–a modern Irish literary tradition. Although a lways a very individual kind of entanglement, the sum of these negotiations of Spenser and his poetic legacy in Ireland testifies to the very depth and intricacy of Spenser’s roots in any version of the Irish literary tradition. But it is the writers themselves who put it best.