Theories of Poetry, 1256-1400.

Author/Editor
Orton, Daniel.

Title
Theories of Poetry, 1256-1400.

Published
Orton, Daniel.  Theories of Poetry, 1256-1400. D.Phil. Dissertation. University of Oxford, 2019. v, 282 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International C83.06(E). Freely accessible at https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:dfc9eb17-71d5-425f-a7b1-2e835310e322; abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Review
"This thesis explores some submerged aspects of the history of the theory of poetry in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, examining the circumstantial factors motivating its intellectual, religious, and moral developments. Starting with the early university men, it argues that the important poetic initiatives of scholastic writers, specifically, Roger Bacon, anticipated the literary advancements and innovative claims conventionally ascribed to the poetic theories of the Italian humanists at the turn of the century. It tracks these theoretical developments and ideas as they move through the exuberant affirmations of poetry made by Albertino Mussato and into the vernacular works of the English writers, John Gower [in the "Confessio Amantis"] and Geoffrey Chaucer [in "The House of Fame"], who ruthlessly interrogate the instability of their own art and explore the uncertainties of literary reception and transmission. Here, the progressive expansion of the status and power of poetic discourse, which had been fought for and won by previous generations of theorists, is conclusively and soundly rejected" (ii). In his chapter on Gower (pp. 109-66), Orton argues that the poet questions poetry's ability to convey meaning reliably: "Gower abandons the radical confidence of the earlier humanist writers . . . in order to adopt a distinctly sceptical view of the power of poetic discourse. Although he demonstrates a strong belief in the transformative potential and moral benefit of his art, he appears equally suspicious of its ability to achieve anything with any certainty. That poetry could be both paralytically futile and morally valuable represents an important self-ironizing tension that drives the 'Confessio' forward . . . , typical of Gower’s desire to thoroughly excise all interpretative stability from his poem. Because the poetic experience represented a crisis of certainty for the reader, there was the very real--and necessary--danger that the dark matter of poetry might remain entirely impenetrable" (116). Orton explores and exemplifies how this "self-ironizing tension" operates in a complex network of ways in CA, large and small, formal and stylistic, overt and submerged. As a "compilatio," CA poses Ovidian hermeneutical variety without resolution, Orton tells us; its "Latin apparatus serves to further impede the efforts of readers to wrest singular meaning from the poem" (123), and its recurrent instances of rhyme riche produce a "dominant effect of disorientation" (127). For Orton, multiple prologues in the poem—especially the main Prologue and the prologue to Book I—pose differing views of what poetry can and should do, while the exchanges between Amans and Genius anatomize "complex range of psychological responses to narrative poetry." Their exchanges constitute a "psychomachia" that "explores the tangled interactions of the internal faculties of the soul, observing both the beneficial and potentially detrimental impact of literary material" (136), focusing attention on how "the evidential status of narrative poetry" is beyond the understanding of individual readers/listeners embodied in Amans (147). Individual narratives in CA, for Orton, contribute to or evince the destabilization of single or simple outlooks on meaning: the paired tales that open Book IV (Aeneas and Dido; Ulysses and Penelope), for example, pose alternative kinds of readers or reading, leading Orton to suggest that, in this light, "there were no texts and no authors, and instead only readers" (147). Similarly, Genius's description of the trial of Cataline in Book VII expresses general wariness about the dangerous power of "affective discourse" (152), prompting Orton to connect this wariness with the overall "blandness" of Gower's style (154); the lack of a narrated resolution to Cataline's trial, Orton tells us, leaves readers to formulate their own conclusions. Orton weaves these and other arguments and evidence in ways that are hard to capture here fully, and he situates them in various rhetorical, exegetical, and psychological contexts, often aligned with the Aristotelian moral philosophy of Giles of Rome and John Trevisa, also difficult to summarize briefly. Notably, Orton punctuates this intricate discussion with resounding, provocative assertions about Gower and his work: the CA "is, in the end, a bleak assessment of the moral utility of poetry" (159); Gower was, for Chaucer, a "moral" poet because "moral poetry was not moralizing poetry, it was darkly uncertain, rich in diversity, and laden with a satirical force that enacted itself on the reader" (163); for Gower, "Arion was a humanist fantasy, a parody of the authoritative and divinely inspired 'poeta theologus,' at least as he perceived it" (164). [MA]

Date
2019

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification