Abstract
The Ruines of Time has figured prominently in this study, first in a discussion of Spenser’s performance of authenticity, and as a companion piece to Virgils Gnat in that work’s retrospective portrait of the Earl of Leicester. To accord the poem so much attention is to read it against its current literary-critical reputation. As its commentators never seem to tire of informing us, the Ruines is not even a good poem — let alone a great one. And as a work rooted firmly in its own historical moment, it has not traveled easily through the centuries. Consequently, it is almost shocking to find the elegy appropriated with reverence by one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated poets, as well as one of Spenser’s most severe critics, William Butler Yeats.
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Notes
On the influence of Spenser on Yeats’s juvenilia, see Wayne K. Chapman, Yeats and English Renaissance Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 69–78.
Poems of Spenser: Selected and with an Introduction by W. B. Yeats (Edinburgh: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1906). For a brief account of the circumstances of Yeats’s essay on Spenser, see W. B. Yeats, Early Essays, George Bornstein and Richard J. Finneran eds. (New York: Scribner, 2007), 467, hereafter cited as Early Essays. For a detailed breakdown of Yeats’s selections of Spenser’s poetry, see Chapman 235–6, n.46, though Chapman errs in setting forth Yeats’s selection of the Ruines as ‘ll. 27–32’, when these are in fact stanzas 27–32 of the poem (ll. 183–224).
Early Essays 266. For studies on Yeats’s personal investment in his criticism of Spenser, see George Bornstein, ‘The Making of Yeats’s Spenser’, Yeats Annual 2 (1984): 21–9, 21.
Enoch Brater, ‘W. B. Yeats: The Poet as Critic’, Journal of Modern Literature 4 (1975): 651–77, 662.
Balachandra Rajan, ‘Yeats and the Renaissance’, Mosaic 5 (1972): 109–18.
David Gardiner, ‘Befitting Emblems of Adversity’: A Modern Irish View of Edmund Spenser from W. B. Yeats to the Present (Omaha, NB: Creighton University Press, 2001), 86–109.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 174. Greenblatt recuperates the readings of ‘romantic’ critics like Yeats and Hazlitt against the scholarly arguments of C. S. Lewis (170–1). His most overt debt to Yeats, however, occurs in the context of remarks on Spenser’s investment in the English state and its imperial ambitions in Ireland (185–6). For a discussion that relates Yeats’s argument to Greeenblatt’s, see Jay Farness, ‘Disenchanted Elves: Biography in the Text of Faerie Queene V’, in Spenser’s Life 18–30, 23–4.
Greenblatt 9. Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text’, in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 303–40, 339, n.47.
On the effect of the 1937 constitution on Yeats, see Gardiner 110–12 and Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 343–4.
John Unterecher, A Reader’s Guide to William Butler Yeats (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1959), 274.
W. B. Yeats, Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose, James Pethica, ed. (New York and London: Norton, 2000), 119–21, 120, ll. 27–32.
William Butler Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan Press, 1961), 259–60. ‘Poetry and Tradition’ quoted in Gardiner 114, my emphasis.
Edwin Greenlaw, Studies in Spenser’s Historical Allegory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932), 116–17.
On the 1590 Faerie Queene as ‘an act of poetic overreaching’, see Ty Buckman, ‘Forcing the Poet into Prose: ‘Gealous Opinions and Misconstructions’ and Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 38 (2005): 17–34, 23.
Richard Verstegan, A Declaration of the True Causes 1592 (London: Scholar Press, 1977), 68.
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© 2011 Bruce Danner
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Danner, B. (2011). Afterword. In: Edmund Spenser’s War on Lord Burghley. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230336674_8
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