The Shaping of English Poetry - Volume III; Essays on 'Beowulf', Dante, 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', Langland, Chaucer and Spenser

This 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. Cover 1 Contents 7 Acknowledgments 9 Abbreviations 11 Preface 21 1 The Treachery of Hrothulf 29 2 Natural and Spiritual Movements of Love in the Soul: An Explanation of Purgatorio, XVIII.16 53 3 The Validity of Gawain’s Confession in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 71 4 Langland and the Love of Money: How Piers Beat His Peers 95 5 The Ending of Troilus and Criseyde 125 6 The Worthiness of Chaucer’s Worthy Knight 151 7 Experience and the Judgment of Poetry: A Reconsideration of The Franklin’s Tale 209 8 Spenser’s Conception of Courtesy and the Design of The Faerie Qveene 239 9 ‘Add faith vnto your force’: The Perfecting of Spenser’s Knight of Holiness in Faith and 267 Index 303 This Collection Of Essays Is Conceived Not As A Summary Of Past Endeavours But As The Beginning Of An Attempt To Present A Sense Of The Wholeness Of A Distinctively English Literature From Beowulf To Spenser. [v. I]. Essays On Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, Langland, Chaucer, And Spenser -- V. Ii. Essays On Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, Langland And Chaucer -- V. Iii. Essays On Beowulf, Dante, Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, Langland, Chaucer And Spenser. Gerald Morgan. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. This third volume of essays under the title The Shaping of English Poetry continues to explore the work of the Gawain-poet, Langland, Chaucer and Spenser. It also includes analysis of Beowulf, a direct ancestor of Sir Gawain and Piers Plowman, and examines Dante’s exposition of love in the Purgatorio. This book discusses the three golden poets of the Golden Age of English poetry in the second half of the fourteenth century, concentrating in particular on Chaucer's response to Aristotelian moral philosophy.