Seamus Heaney has been mentioned; interesting to find his balanced opinion on all this, from his Oxford lectures collected in *The Redress of Poetry* (Faber and Faber 1995).

First he quotes from the *Spenser Handbook* to summarize the "'rough work for Lord Grey'" done by Raleigh and Spenser.  Then he dons Yeats' mantle:

"We have been forced to cast a suspicious eye on the pretensions of Renaissance humanism by having its sacred texts placed in the context of their authors' participation in such brutally oppressive escapades; we have been rightly instructed about the ways that native populations and indigenous cultures disappear in the course of these civilizing enterprises, and we have learnt how the values and language of the conqueror demolish and marginalize native values and institutions, rendering them barbarous, subhuman, and altogether beyond the pale of cultivated sympathy or regard.  But even so, it still seems an abdication of literary responsibility to be swayed by these desperately overdue correctives to a point where imaginative literature is read simply and solely as a function of an oppresive discourse, or as a reprehensible masking.  When it comes to poetic composition, one has to allow for the presence, even for the pre-eminence, of what Wordsworth called 'the ! grand elementary principle of pleasure', and that pleasure comes from the doing-in-language of certain things.  One has to allow for the fact that, in the words of Ezra Pound:

'the thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity or radio activity, a force transfusing, welding and unifying.  A force rather like water when it spurts up through very bright sand and sets it in swift motion.  You may make what image you like.'

Pound's image does not preclude art's implication in the structures and shifts of power at any given moment, but it does suggest a salubrious role for it within the body politic; and another image which the Czech poet Miroslav Holub uses about theatre may also be adduced here.  Holub sees the function of drama, and so by extension the function of poetry and of the arts in general, as being analogous to that of the immunity system within the human body.  Which is to say that the creative spirit remains positively recalcitrant in face of the negative evidence, reminding the indicative mood of history that it has been written in by force and written in over the good optative mood of human potential." (23-4)

Amen (now if only Heaney would keep writing prose!).  Those of us on the field trip to Raleigh's house in Youghal, during the Kilcolman conference of 1999, will remember the hostess' story about Heaney's visit to the same place; upon entering the oak-paneled room with a dormer windor, where once in legend Spenser sat composing his verse, Heaney reportedly quoted Spenser at length by heart (the hostess didn't say what).  Yeats, also aware of politics, called Spenser's poetry "bars of gold thrown down one upon another" (to paraphrase); hardly a defeatist view. 

[For Heaney on Yeats' relation to Spenser and the hierophanic literary "quincunx" of Ireland, i.e., Kilcolman, Tor Ballylee, Joyce's Martello tower, MacNeice's Carrickfergus and (in the center) "''the pre-natal mountain''" of ancient Ireland, cf. *Redress* pp. 199-200; of note also is McCabe's recent discussion of Heaney in his bookreview of Hamilton's new edition in the recent Sp N]  --TH