Edward Thomas on Gower.
- Author/Editor
- Edwards, A. S. G.
- Title
- Edward Thomas on Gower.
- Published
- Edwards, A. S. G. "Edward Thomas on Gower." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 11-20.
- Review
- This essay examines two reviews of G. C. Macaulay's Clarendon Press edition of "The Complete Works of John Gower" written by the poet Edward Thomas. Edwards provides both a reprinting of these two reviews, making them available for other Gower scholars, as well as an illuminating commentary on them. The first review, "Chaucer's Mate," presents a comparison of Gower's CA with Chaucer. As Edwards comments, this review is marked by the usual preference for Chaucer within this pairing, but it also goes out of its way to "articulate the intrinsic qualities of Gower as a poet and to see such qualities as positive ones" (12). The second review, "The Poet of Southwark," concerns only the fourth volume of Macaulay's edition, that containing the Latin works. Here, as Edwards points out, the method shifts to a more historical framework, leading Thomas to both make an early comparison between Gower and Langland and also to castigate Gower as a poet "lacking in courage" as Thomas reads the VC as a timid refusal to join with the forces of "reformation," siding rather with a "superficial and shameful" order (13). As Edwards further comments: "There is an obvious proleptic irony in Thomas' sense of Gower's predicament. The moral dilemma he believes confronted 'timid' Gower was one he was to face himself in a very different way when he chose to fight in the First World War; he died there on the battlefield in 1917" (13). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1]
- Date
- 2020
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds and General Criticism