John Gower.

Author/Editor
Yeager, R. F.

Title
John Gower.

Published
Yeager, R. F. "John Gower." In Helen Cooper and Robert R. Edwards, eds. The Oxford History of Poetry in English. Volume 2. Medieval Poetry: 1100-1400 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 440-56.

Review
Yeager's contribution to the "Oxford History of Poetry in English" bids to establish a new status for Gower in English literary history: that of a ground-breaker; a metrical, formal, and stylistic innovator. Covering a wide range of information about Gower's works and traditional topics in Gower criticism--Gower's trilingualism, his poetic ambitions, his sources, and the relative chronology of his works--Yeager weaves them together with particular emphasis on what he calls "a broad strain of experimentalism that runs throughout" Gower's works in all three languages (441), most evident in cross-fertilizations across language boundaries. Early on, Yeager cites "'Eneidos bucolis'" and the three-volume, three-language head-rest of Gower's tomb effigy as evidence that his "sense of a poetic self took Virgil's example as an inspiration" and "his decision to write extensively--and continually--in French, Latin, and Middle English" (440-41). "[D]iscoveries made writing verse in one language," Yeager maintains, "at times carried over influentially into his work in others," and this essay is--to put it over-simply--a description of those carry-overs from Gower's French and Latin poetry into his "Confessio Amantis." After a brief acknowledgement of the uncertainties of dating Gower's works and manuscripts (recurrent sub-topics), Yeager launches his assessment of "Mirour de l'Omme" (in French, "written in the 1370s or somewhat earlier") as "an ambitious enterprise, particularly if it was indeed Gower's initial poetic project" (441). The length of the MO, its intricate, twelve-line stanzas, and the regularity of its meter are Yeager's concerns here as they anticipate "Gower's future poetics" in the "Vox Clamantis" and the "Confessio Amantis," particularly his habitually "smooth flowing verse" (442), achieved via willingness "to subordinate both syntax and grammar" in the French prosody of the MO and similar manipulations of English in CA. Yeager adds that the "inward turn" (442) of the MO, "moving from allegory to social criticism to intense self-scrutiny"--"altogether unprecedented in late medieval literature"--anticipates Gower's unusual combinations of genres elsewhere, his "formal iconoclasm" (443). Formal concerns are also Yeager's targets in his discussion of Gower's two other French works, "Traitié" and "Cinkante Balades." Yeager argues for dating "Traité" rather earlier than usual (see n12), and suggests persuasively that, as in the CA (which may have been composed or revised at or about the same time), marginal Latin glosses enact "dialogic argument as a means to examine ideas" (444). In the "Traitié," the argument is "unfolded one balade at a time"--an "entirely original conception apparently unique to Gower" (443). The early dating of the "Traitié" also enables Yeager to extend Martin Duffell's argument (1996) about Gower's hendecasyllables and to suggest that "Gower, rather than Chaucer, may have invented iambic pentameter--albeit in French" (444). In turn, the CB is, for Yeager, a "true sequence, each poem building upon the next to supply information about events, and particularly character, both of the male lover and the lady he addresses," anticipating Philip Sidney's "Astrophil and Stella" by two hundred years and prompting Yeager to speculation: "Had Gower elected to write the 'Cinkante Balades' in English, his subsequent reputation would have been very different" (445). The CB influenced the characterization of Amans in CA, Yeager tells us, the vocabularies of the poems are similar at points, and, as with the "Traitié," "resonances" of the CB "are detectable in Gower's English prosody" (446). Turning to Gower's Latin works, Yeager sidesteps "Cronica Tripertita" because it is too late to influence CA (although it may have affected "In Praise of Peace"), and goes on to treat the "Vox Clamantis" as innovative in two respects: the dream vision of the "Visio Anglie" and the plain style of the VC at large. For Yeager, the "Visio" opens as a traditional dream vision, but "quickly transforms into a harrowing nightmare unmatched in English literature, save only, perhaps, by the 'Nighttown' section of James Joyce's 'Ulysses." (446). The plain style of VC---its "unrhymed elegiac distichs" (Yeager here following A. G. Rigg, 1992)--"had little contemporary precedent in England," even though Langland was trying something similar in English when seeking to reach a "discernable audience" through a middle style. Moreover, the plain style of VC contrasts sharply with the "highly artificial scholastic verse" of medieval Latin poetry and, "probably of greater importance" to Gower, it was a means whereby he "positioned himself with Virgil and Ovid" (447). The "thoughtful, innovative poetics" of Gower's "remoulding" of classical poetry occupies Yeager briefly while he revisits his earlier (1989) assessment of classical "cento" in VC, where Gower borrowed lines from classical sources and recontextualized them to produce new meanings in his own poems--techniques that are, like the others mentioned above, "replicated in Gower's Middle English work, if in somewhat different garb" (448). The CA is not, of course, a wholly Middle English text at all: "Gower envisioned it as a work in two languages, English and Latin" (449). Its Latin prose glosses produce, as they do in the "Traitié," a "bilingual polyvocality" which provides Gower with an "alternative 'voice', unidentifiably sourced in the text but specifically non-authorial with which to usher the reader into, and engage with, the vernacular poetry" (449). Moreover, the CA includes poetic passages in Latin (the Latin in "Traitié" is prose), and the labor Gower expends on them, for Yeager, "suggests additional aesthetic ambition." Structurally, "most of the Latin verses" included in CA, Yeager tells us, "mark stages" in Amans' confession, but they also "introduce ideas, and . . . images that will arise in the English many lines later" (450) and at greater length, producing poetic effects that Yeager exemplifies: characterization, "deliberated irony," and punning--"enriching and thickening the English, albeit in riddling--even Donnean--fashion." Explicating interactions between several passages of English verse in CA and Latin ones, Yeager demonstrates that Latin recurrently introduces or interjects "playfulness" into his poem without diminishing its seriousness of purpose, i.e., the "socio-political concerns" that run throughout MO, VC, and CA; the "basic strategy and socially ameliorative purpose that remain the same in all three poems" (452); and the differing, though purposive, targeting of their audiences. The final movement of Yeager's essay is a detailed survey of the resonances of Gower's French prosody in his CA: the use of exemplary tales as in MO, albeit with "greater sophistication" in CA; the "mutual crossover" in his "handling of rhyme" in CA and CB, essentially "monosyllabic, or simple bi-syllables" (453); the "near-absolute regularity of metre" in CA that has "no English counterpart" but does in French poetry by Machaut, Deschamps, and Gower himself; and--Latin here as well as French--the virtuosity with which Gower sustains congruency of "grammar, syntax, [and] precise word selection" over long stretches to carry "extended thoughts smoothly over many lines, notwithstanding the shortness of the four-beat couplet that renders this task demanding." In short, Gower's "mastery of the verse-paragraph is nonpareil" (454), a claim that Yeager substantiates through explication of several passages in which he identifies Gower's "mellifluousness," "aural imagery" and "arresting vividness" (455). Maintaining that "the accentual pattern of conventional English speech over thousands of lines is a control Gower alone achieves," Yeager exclaims that "Chaucer seldom matches it; Hoccleve and Lydgate, never" (454). Yeager's enthusiasm for Gower's cross-fertilizing innovations and poetic style may well put to rest the generations-old canard that Gower is a pedestrian poet (search "dull" in the John Gower Bibliography Online for too many examples). Whether or not Yeager's essay cements a new, more positive orthodoxy of Gower as an experimentalist remains to be seen, but its evidence, arguments, authority, and placement in the Oxford History give it a good chance to do so. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1]

Date
2023

Gower Subjects
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Mirour de l'Omme
Vox Clamantis
Confessio Amantis
Cinkante Balades
In Praise of Peace
Cronica Tripertita
Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz
Minor Latin Poetry