Gower's Ovidian Aesthetics and Its Discontents.
- Author/Editor
- Yeager, R. F.
- Title
- Gower's Ovidian Aesthetics and Its Discontents.
- Published
- Yeager, R. F. "Gower's Ovidian Aesthetics and Its Discontents." In William Green, Daniel Herbert, and Noelle Phillips, eds. Textual Traditions and Medieval Literary Culture: Essays in Honour of Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2025), pp. 89-107.
- Review
- Yeager neatly expresses the broad outlines of his perspective on Gower's "discontent" with Ovid in the final paragraph of this essay: "the disquieting problem I believe Gower discovered in his last years with Ovid as an aesthetic model was posterity . . . . [A]s a poet of continuing transformation, and earth-bound love, Ovid fell short of that Petrarchan high seriousness that promised permanence. Virgil, alone, possessed that" (107). However, like Ovid, Yeager explains earlier, Gower "had problems with" Virgil, in Gower's case with both the "tyrannical imperialism" (103) of the "Aeneid" and the "military adventurism" (106) of Aeneas, helping Yeager to explain why Virgils' direct influence on Gower was slight, and why the Virgil we find in the "Confessio Amantis" is a magician and a failed lover, not a poet; Aeneas, a betrayer rather than a hero--both based in romance rather than epic, and both, perhaps, influenced by Augustine's critique of Virgil in his "Confessions" and "De civitate Dei." Gower well knew of Virgil's enduring status and wanted such "posterity" (95) for himself, a goal he was, perhaps, introduced to by Chaucer, Yeager suggests, and a topic likely to have been discussed among those in "Gower's circle"--Chaucer, Ralph Strode, and others (102n47)--especially as purveyed by Petrarch. Previously, Ovid had provided Gower with a wide range of narratives of transformation and love--topics Gower took up early in his "Visio Anglie" and in CA (c. 1381-82)--especially those that posed "hopeful aspiration" implicit in "continual . . . potentially ameliorative change." Over time, however (both Gower's age and "Richard's darkening rule" played roles here, Yeager observes) Gower's "outlook changed" (94) and a "new ambition" developed: he grew concerned to establish a poetic legacy of the sort articulated by Petrarch. Yeager is careful to make clear that "no evidence has surfaced yet of Gower's reading of any work of Petrarch's," but he makes it equally clear that a new idea of authorship was coalescing in England at the very late fourteenth century--a preoccupation with "posterity, a concept concerned with the life of letters that Petrarch re-invented, framing poetic immortality solidly around Virgil" (95). Yeager shows that Gower "moves away from Ovid" (98) in his late works (1390s and after), examining closely the nuances (and authorship questions) of "Quam quincere," "Eneidos bucolis," and "Quia unusquisque" as "fruits of conversation within Gower's circle" (102) and the result of a "Petrarchan gaze" (99), tinged with "clear distrust, even a detestation, of the worldly pretensions of imperium" (103) that Gower associated with Virgil. Throughout this essay, Yeager's own gaze is on Ovid but it widens out to include significant engagement with Virgil and Petrarch, along with Chaucer, Strode, and even Langland and Lydgate, offering a wide-ranging exploration of changes in Gower's poetic outlook, a rumination rich in details, nuances, sidelights, implications for chronology, and provocative questions, many of the latter left hanging, tantalizingly, for future consideration, even though some of them already have been addressed in studies not mentioned by Yeager. See, for example, T. Matthew N. McCabe's "Vernacular Authorship and Public Poetry: John Gower" (2020). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1]
- Date
- 2025
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Vox Clamantis
Confessio Amantis
Later Latin Poetry