poems in Cricket Online Review

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

A sequence of four of my poems appears in Cricket Online Review. These poems are drawn from a book-length manuscript entitled The Short Century. They use lines of mostly six or nine syllables to explore textures, anticipation, and the juxtaposition of large and small. The poems are untitled. Here’s one of them:

it pummels the surf, it is not meant
so the phoenix wrangles its cracked skin
always the last time/ whether on
or in, it is a view you can’t get
possible response runs the table
(then actual response) like a gun
waits in the stocking like a catfish
brighter than life and incredibly
small

Update, 12/14: artist Marcy Erb has drawn a lovely illustration for one of my Cricket Online Review poems. Now I will always think of the illustration in connection with this poem:

weiskott_poem1

artwork by Marcy Erb

Lawman in verse history

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My essay, “Lawman, the Last Old English Poet and the First Middle English Poet,” appears in an edited volume devoted to this late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century poet, edited by Marie-Françoise Alamichel. The essay collection, published by L’Harmattan, grew out of a 2012 conference at the Sorbonne. My essay is a version of the third chapter of my first book. Here’s the opening frame of this chapter:

Alliterative poetry of the late eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries rarely refers to the Norman Conquest of England (1066). Every sour note has been wrung for maximum effect in modern criticism, but the implied contrast with pre-Conquest poetry is unconvincing. The Death of William the Conqueror (1087-1121) is alone in criticizing the Normans, which it does in a ham-fisted way that calls to mind a few spoiled monks, not the righteous indignation of the peasantry. The sense of a way of life coming to an end in Durham (1104-1109) and the First Worcester Fragment (late twelfth c.) has precedents in a variety of Old English poems. It is superfluous to add contemporary politics to the list of reasons why poets employed the topos. The pivotal event for post-1066 alliterative poetry was not the Conquest, but the publication of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brittaniae (c. 1138). To judge from the extant corpus, alliterative poets’ fascination with the Arthurian past began in a Worcestershire priest’s massive verse translation of the Historia material, extant in two copies and now known as The Brut (c. 1200).

Scholars have always had the impression that the Brut is metrically “loose” in comparison with earlier and later alliterative poetry. In what follows this impression will be rejected. Careful study of alliterative meter yields a clear developmental arc connecting Beowulf to the Brut and the Brut to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth c.). The new account of the evolution of alliterative verse advanced in this book challenges the view of Early Middle English poetry as the refuse of a more glorious tradition. When metrical change is seen as the predictable result of the passage of time rather than a symptom of decadence, alliterative meter can be appreciated as a dynamic institution rather than a gradually eroded edifice. This chapter clarifies recent scholarship on the meter of the Brut and extends it to other Early Middle English alliterative poetry. I show Lawman’s meter to be highly organized, directly related to Old English and to Middle English alliterative meter, and unrelated to Ælfric of Eynsham’s ‘rhythmical alliteration.’ Through consideration of particular words and passages, the second section demonstrates how Lawman’s conservative style resembles that of his Old English predecessors, how the two manuscript versions of the Brut represent two different visions for the future of alliterative verse, and how Lawman’s treatment of the Arthurian past anticipates Middle English romance. By implicating Lawman and other Early Middle English alliterative poetry in a long verse history, I seek to answer recent calls for a revaluation of the twelfth century in English literary history.

English prosody and poetics

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My individual graduate tutorial, English Prosody and Poetics, 1300-1600 (syllabus), will run this spring. This tutorial is a practical and theoretical introduction to issues in late medieval and sixteenth-century poetics. Here are the learning objectives for each unit:

1. Introduction to Verse History and Historical Poetics

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history of metrical study and the key concepts ‘rhythm’ and ‘meter’; comparison of intrinsic (formal/practical) and extrinsic (historical/cultural) approaches to metrical form; practical understanding of modern syllabic meters.

2. The Alliterative Tradition in its Eighth Century

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history and cultural contexts of the alliterative meter in the late medieval period; comparison of competing explanations for the existence of fourteenth-century alliterative poetry; comparison of the use of the alliterative meter in two compositions, Piers Plowman and St. Erkenwald; practical understanding of alliterative b-verse meter.

3. Chaucer’s Tetrameter

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history and cultural contexts of the tetrameter or octosyllable in the fourteenth century; comparison of more and less strictly syllabic accentual English meters; practical understanding of template meter or dolnik.

4 & 5. Chaucer’s Pentameter, Tail Rhyme, and Prose

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history and cultural contexts of Chaucer’s decasyllable/pentameter in the fourteenth century; comparison of Chaucer’s several meters and two staged discussions of form (after Sir Thopas and in the Parson’s Prologue); understanding of the relationships between metrical form and manuscript form in Sir Thopas; comparison of Chaucer’s metrical choices in the larger context of his ‘metrical landscape’; practical understanding of Chaucer’s decasyllable/pentameter.

6. Chaucer’s Pentameter in the Fifteenth Century

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history and cultural contexts of Chaucer’s decasyllable/pentameter in the fifty years following Chaucer’s death; comparison of Chaucer’s metrical habits to those of his literary heirs, Hoccleve and Lydgate; understanding of the critical uses of, and historical problems with, the concept of a ‘Chaucerian tradition’ extending into the fifteenth century; practical understanding of Lydgate’s decasyllable/pentameter.

7. (Chaucer’s) Pentameter in the Sixteenth Century

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history and cultural contexts of the decasyllable/pentameter in the sixteenth century; comparison of Chaucer’s metrical habits to those of Wyatt, Surrey, and Shakespeare; understanding of Martin Duffell’s concept of ‘the Italian line in English,’ with reference both to Chaucer and later versifiers; critical scrutiny of sixteenth-century perceptions of earlier and contemporary meter as expressed by Gascoigne and Puttenham; practical understanding of Wyatt’s decasyllable/pentameter.

Chaucer the forester

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My article, “Chaucer the Forester: The Friar’s Tale, Forest History, and Officialdom,” appears in the Chaucer Review. This article argues that the Anglo-Norman forest bureaucracy provides a point of contact between Chaucer’s life and the social satire of the Friar’s Tale. Here are the opening and concluding paragraphs:

Some time between 1390 and his death in 1400, Chaucer served as a substitute forester in North Petherton, Somerset. Although it probably required little more than occasional desk work, and although it was the last and worst-documented of Chaucer’s many dalliances with the administrative machinery of late-fourteenth-century England, the position affirms the persistence into the reign of Richard II of the decadent Norman royal forest system. While it is uncertain whether art imitated life or vice versa in each case, a number of Chaucer’s literary works mention forestry and make use of its specialized vocabulary. In the Book of the Duchess, for example, the poet employs a slew of technical terms over the course of Octavian’s hunt (344–86). The Knight’s Yeoman and (as will be shown) the Friar’s Tale’s devil-yeoman are especially important in the present connection because they are foresters, albeit of a more practical variety than the historical Chaucer. In what follows, it is argued that the Friar’s Tale, by a series of dramatic ironies, critiques the royal forest system in which Chaucer was (or was to become) a minor official. The first section outlines fourteenth-century English forest history and its reception in poetry of the period; the second presents a reading of the Friar’s Tale, with special attention to the figure of the devil-yeoman and the tale’s satire on the royal forest and other administrative systems.

[…]

Read in the context of forest history and the rise of bureaucracy in England, the Friar’s Tale’s summoner’s morbid curiosity about demondom recapitulates a growing contemporary fascination with officialdom, making the Friar’s Tale a kind of brief speculum officiale. Within the predictable logic of the devil-and-advocate fable, the summoner’s inquisitiveness leads to his damnation, while on a metatextual view, it signals a departure from the world of good and evil. As in the tale’s sources and analogues, Chaucer’s devil does not lower or cackle; his respect for “entente” marks him as an exemplary officer. By casting the devil as a forest official, Chaucer goes one step further than his sources in suggesting an administrative rather than a theological moral for the tale. The devil’s double instantiation as demon and yeoman invites a comparison between divine and secular administrations, and if Chaucer seems to suggest, or to have his Friar suggest, that clerical administration by its nature encourages corruption, the obvious irony of selecting the despised royal forest as its well-ordered opposite reveals the outlines of a much more nuanced critique of officialdom. When the devil-yeoman forcibly invites the summoner to “knowen of oure privetee” (III 1637), Chaucer not only makes perfectly clear the Friar’s heavy-handed point that it is in the depths of the abyss that “somonours han hir heritage” (III 1641); he also raises for his audience the narrative possibility of embarking on the Dantean journey to hell and back, for a working knowledge of the divine and infernal “privetee” that takes the form of an administration, and in whose image human organization is bound to discover its form.

three-position verses in Beowulf

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My note, “Three-Position Verses in Beowulf,” appears in Notes and Queries. This note proposes that some metrical patterns with three positions are rare but authentic in the meter of Beowulf. More generally, the note seeks to draw a theoretical distinction between systematic metrical patterns (those that adhere to the metrical system obtaining at a given point in verse history) and asystematic patterns (those that do not adhere to the synchronic metrical system for historical reasons). Here’s the opening frame:

The most recent theory of Old English meter is that of Nicolay Yakovlev. Like many of his predecessors, Yakovlev finds that the Old English half-line is composed of four metrical positions. However, he countenances two five-position patterns, known in Sieversian notation as A* and D*. He goes on to discuss the theoretical implications of their existence:

[A] traditional metre is hardly ever given opportunity [sic] to become completely cohesive. The average time span between major prosodic upheavals appears to be less than that required to eliminate any remains of the previous restructuring. It means, inter alia, that the number of asystemic patterns, i.e. patterns that are not produced by general metrical rules and should therefore be specified individually, may be greater or smaller at any given point in poetic history, but it will hardly ever be zero. Given the rare opportunity to observe a cross-section in the history of a poetic tradition, we always see ‘a work in progress’; the picture observed will always be inherently dynamic, similarly to a proper synchronic description of a language. Old English patterns D* and A* seem to be examples of such a historical residue.

Yakovlev provides a brilliant explanation for the occurrence of five-position verses. In a ‘traditional metre’, i.e., one with a continuous historical development, marginal patterns could coexist with normative ones for a certain length of time before being normalized or reinterpreted as a new norm. Yakovlev does not identify any other ‘asystemic patterns’, but nothing in his account of Old English meter precludes the possibility.

Although they are always explained differently or emended, verses of the form SxS occur in Beowulf. […]