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English Alliterative Verse tells the story of the medieval poetic
tradition that includes Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight, stretching from the eighth century, when English
poetry first appeared in manuscripts, to the sixteenth century,
when alliterative poetry ceased to be composed. Eric Weiskott draws
on the study of meter to challenge the traditional division of
medieval English literary history into Old English and Middle
English periods. The two halves of the alliterative tradition,
divided by the Norman Conquest of 1066, have been studied
separately since the nineteenth century; this book uses the history
of metrical form and its cultural meanings to bring the two halves
back together. In combining literary history and metrical
description into a new kind of history he calls 'verse history',
Weiskott reimagines the historical study of poetics.
What would English literary history look like if the unit of
measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The
earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the
meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which
first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn
preceded pentameter, the five-stress line that would become the
dominant English verse form of modernity, though it was invented by
Chaucer in the 1380s. While this chronology is accurate, Eric
Weiskott argues, the traditional periodization of literature in
modern scholarship distorts the meaning of meters as they appeared
to early poets and readers. In Meter and Modernity in English
Verse, 1350-1650, Weiskott examines the uses and misuses of these
three meters as markers of literary time, "medieval" or "modern,"
though all three were in concurrent use both before and after 1500.
In each section of the book, he considers two of the traditions
through the prism of a third element: alliterative meter and
tetrameter in poems of political prophecy; alliterative meter and
pentameter in William Langland's Piers Plowman and early blank
verse; and tetrameter and pentameter in Chaucer, his predecessors,
and his followers. Reversing the historical perspective in which
scholars conventionally view these authors, Weiskott reveals
Langland to be metrically precocious and Chaucer metrically
nostalgic. More than a history of prosody, Weiskott's book
challenges the divide between medieval and modern literature.
Rejecting the premise that modernity occurred as a specifiable
event, he uses metrical history to renegotiate the trajectories of
English literary history and advances a narrative of sociocultural
change that runs parallel to metrical change, exploring the
relationship between literary practice, social placement, and
historical time.
New investigations into Charles d'Orleans' under-rated poem, its
properties and its qualities. The compilation Fortunes Stabilnes,
the English poetry Charles d'Orleans wrote in the course of his
twenty-five year captivity in England after Agincourt, requires a
larger lens than that of Chaucerianism, through which it has most
often been viewed. A fresh view from another perspective, one that
attends to form and style, as well as to the poet's French
traditions, reveals a more conceptually complex and innovative kind
of poetry than we have seen until now. The essays collected here
reassess him in the light of recent work in Middle English studies.
They detail those qualities that make his text one of the most
accomplished and moving of the late Middle Ages: Charles's use of
English, his metrical play, his felicity with formes fixes lyrics,
his innovative use of the dits structure and lyric sequences, and
finally, above all, his ability to write beautiful poetry. Overall,
they bring out the underappreciated contribution made by Charles to
the canon of English poetry.
English Alliterative Verse tells the story of the medieval poetic
tradition that includes Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight, stretching from the eighth century, when English
poetry first appeared in manuscripts, to the sixteenth century,
when alliterative poetry ceased to be composed. Eric Weiskott draws
on the study of meter to challenge the traditional division of
medieval English literary history into Old English and Middle
English periods. The two halves of the alliterative tradition,
divided by the Norman Conquest of 1066, have been studied
separately since the nineteenth century; this book uses the history
of metrical form and its cultural meanings to bring the two halves
back together. In combining literary history and metrical
description into a new kind of history he calls 'verse history',
Weiskott reimagines the historical study of poetics.
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