Art for Art's Sake: Aesthetic Decisions in John Gower's "Cinkante Balades."
- Author/Editor
- Yeager, R. F.
- Title
- Art for Art's Sake: Aesthetic Decisions in John Gower's "Cinkante Balades."
- Published
- Yeager, R. F. "Art for Art's Sake: Aesthetic Decisions in John Gower's "Cinkante Balades." In Essays on Aesthetics and Medieval Literature in Honor of Howell Chickering, ed. John M. Hill, Bonnie Wheeler, and R. F. Yeager. (Toronto: PIMS, 2014), pp. 179-93.
- Review
- In this appreciative, even personal. essay, Yeager praises "Cinkante Balades" as "very fine art" and "finely crafted" (179), commending Gower's "very subtle work requiring poetic control and significant psychological acumen" (189). Yeager imagines a counterfactual "what-if" for English literary history, claiming that, had Gower chosen to write CB in English rather than in French, his "reputation would be far the better, and the history of English would have been written differently" (179) because CB is a "true poetic sequence" that uses "a lyric form to tell a story"--something not attempted in poetry in English until Philip Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella," two hundred years later. Yeager situates the writing of CB historically, showing that it was modeled on the very popular "Livre du Cent Ballades," analogous to Christine de Pizan's "Cent Ballades" in this respect, and influenced by Guillaume de Machaut's "Voir Dit" in others. The bulk of Yeager's essay, however, describes the aesthetic riches of CB--stanzaic structuring, narrative plotting, characterization, imagery, and manipulation of clichés--illustrated in large portion through close reading of two of the ballades, XLVI and XXXII, both of which show that "Gower's psychological insight is dead-on" (190), Yeager tells us, particularly in their subtle, delicate expression of the lovers' complex emotions and, in the Petrarchan mode, their anxious attitudes toward sexual relations. Speaking of XLVI in particular, Yeager says "This is poetry for grown-ups" (188); more generally, CB was written by a poet of superb skills and "artistic intelligence" (191), who, according to Yeager, "was never the prude modern critics have made him out to be" (186). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]
- Date
- 2014
- Gower Subjects
- Cinkante Balades
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification