In this volume, 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' use of Spenser as an aesthetic and political model to John Montague's reassessment of the reciprocal definations of the poet and the nation throughout reference to Spenser. Gardiner also includes analysis of Spenser's influence on Northern Irish poets. The afterword on the work of Thomas McCarthy, Sean Dunne, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, among others, discusses how Montague's reinterpretation of Spenser influeneced this most recent generation of Irish poets.