This essay argues that Spenser's Shepheardes Calender invents a poetics of deliberate estrangement, capitalizing on the unpromising fact of England's remoteness from the classical world. Although it is understood both in the Renaissance and in modern criticism as the natural starting point for a poetic career, pastoral is a singularly inhospitable genre for an English poet: in Virgil's first eclogue Britain appears as the antithesis of pastoral contentment, a place of exile and colonial abjection. By treating English as a quasi-foreign tongue - and adopting the errant and alienated persona of Colin Clout - Spenser repeats this marginalizing gesture, discovering in distance itself a means of reinvigorating vernacular poetry. Ultimately, his insistence on the virtues of estrangement allows Spenser to find a place for pastoral and for Colin Clout in England's own abject colonial sphere, beyond the Irish pale.

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