Description
Book SynopsisThis third volume of essays under the title
The Shaping of English Poetry includes, as in the previous volumes, essays on
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Langland, Chaucer and Spenser; it also includes essays on
Beowulf and Dante. It was never the author’s intention to exclude Old English poetry from the historical continuum of English poetry, and practical rather than ideological considerations explain the absence of
Beowulf from the two previous volumes. The language of
Beowulf is in all essentials the language of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and
Piers Plowman, in one and the same native alliterative tradition, and also the language of Chaucer, in the European tradition inherited from the great French and Italian poets. The transition from
Beowulf to Dante may seem abrupt, but the poetry of Chaucer, whose assimilation of Italian influences is both formidable and remarkable, requires us to make it. Indeed, the exploration in this volume of Dante’s exposition of love in the
Purgatorio takes us to the heart of the poetry that we associate with the period of Chaucer’s greatness in the 1380s and 1390s. Here we see not an anachronistic system of courtly love, imposed on medieval poems by modern critics, but distinctions of natural, sensitive and rational love that make sense (among other things) of the ending of
Troilus and Criseyde as the poem’s logical and persuasive conclusion.
Table of ContentsContents: The Treachery of Hrothulf – Natural and Spiritual Movements of Love in the Soul: An Explanation of
Purgatorio, XVIII. 16-39 – The Validity of Gawain’s Confession in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – Langland and the Love of Money: How Piers Beat His Peers – The Ending of
Troilus and Criseyde – The Worthiness of Chaucer’s Worthy Knight – Experience and the Judgment of Poetry: A Reconsideration of
The Franklin’s Tale – Spenser’s Conception of Courtesy and the Design of
The Faerie Qveene – ‘Add faith vnto your force’: The Perfecting of Spenser’s Knight of Holiness in Faith and Humility.
