"Loquela gravis iuvat": Gower's "O deus immense" and the Place of Poetry, 1398-1400."

Author/Editor
Weiskott, Eric.

Title
"Loquela gravis iuvat": Gower's "O deus immense" and the Place of Poetry, 1398-1400."

Published
Weiskott, Eric. "'Loquela gravis iuvat': Gower's "O deus immense" and the Place of Poetry, 1398-1400," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 45 (2023): 205-46

Review
Weiskott's article isn't easily summarized, as it represents a kind of "magnum opus" on Gower's shortish (104 lines) Latin poem, "O deus immense," in order to argue strongly for a reassessment of its importance in the canon of Gower's works. In the process he covers the difficulties of dating its composition (sometime between 1398 and 1400); whether or not its subject was kings in general or Richard II exclusively (he goes back and forth, but more or less favors Richard: see pp. 221, 227, 246); Gower's quarrying of it (very sharply observed) to insert variously elsewhere (226-27); and its (justified) claim to belonging among the "public, monitory, prophetic, and enigmatic" (244) poems of the early years of the Lancastrian usurpation--"Richard the Redeless," and "Bede's Prophecy" in particular, the latter introduced here by Weiskott. He concludes: "Gower supposed that writing enigmatic, prophetic, monitory verses 'ad regem' on behalf of a recalcitrant, inarticulate public was a difficult, noble, and urgent political task, and he was not alone in so supposing. Gower had long harbored those views individually, dispersed throughout metaliterary and purple passages in his trilingual trilogy. In "O deus immense" Gower encapsulates the poet's task with unwonted concision and self-reflexive panache." [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]

Date
2023

Gower Subjects
Minor Latin Poetry
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations