Spenser's ‘goodly thought’: Heroides 15 and The Teares of the Muses

Ovid's Heroides are engaged by Edmund Spenser's complaint poem The Teares of the Muses (published 1591). Spenser makes use of a shard of text from Heroides 15 (Sappho to Phaon) in an effort to represent the origins of self‐consciousness as revealed in the instant of poetic inspiration. At the centre of this representation of Spenser's is the existence of a voice inside the head out of which first emerges the thinking of new thoughts. The sixteenth‐century editorial recensions of the well known crux contained in the lines from Heroides 15 with which Spenser engages point to the frisson of such inner speech. Correspondingly, the dialectical quality of the Heroides as voices seeking responses is exploited by Spenser's intertextual poetics in his representation of the momentary fulfilment of a newly created thought. In the resulting display of the immanent origins of self‐consciousness, Spenser's Heroides enable his quest to reveal the present source from which a sense of self might develop across past and future; such a development being a major preoccupation of his poetic career.