Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism

The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales has the most famous opening to a poem in English, describing the coming of spring in traditional yet always fresh style. It sums up much that is so attractive in medieval poetry.

Literacy is even more evident in Chaucer. In early poems, The Book of the Duchess (1368) and The Parliament of Fowls (around 1380), he describes reading himself to sleep. He translated the fifth-century Latin philosophical work The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, and incorporated much of its themes and even words into the philosophical romances Troilus and Criseyde and the poem about Palamon and Arcite now known as The Knight’s Tale.

Romantic love (sometimes in the twentieth century called ‘courtly love’) was perhaps the greatest literary invention of the Middle Ages. Sexual love, rising above promiscuous sexual lust, is of course found to some extent in many cultures and historical periods. But it was medieval European literature, with its mixture of pagan and Christian love, that established it as a major literary institution.

Any notion of genre must be deployed with historical sensitivity if it is to be a tool to unlock the difference of ourselves from the past. It is exciting to deconstruct Donne or Milton, and much can be revealed in the process about the ways in which their poetry may be made to speak to our present concerns—but it is at least as important to uncover the ways in which their language is alien and different, and generic self-consciousness can aid in the understanding of that difference.

For all their differences from one another neither the New Criticism nor its unruly child deconstruction, which between them have dominated the discussion of lyric poetry in recent years, has made a fundamental dent in romantic and post-romantic notions of what defines the lyric genre.

Most modern readers derive their assumptions about poetry in general, and lyric in particular, from the attitude seemingly embodied in Wordsworth’s famous dictum about poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling’.

Critics have for half a century been drawing attention to the essentially rhetorical nature of Donne’s poetry—and, indeed, one reason for his reinstatement in the canon in the earlier part of this century was precisely that he seemed to provide a model for the modernist attempt to escape from a romantic tyranny of personal feeling.

Renaissance writers were trained within the disciplines of rhetoric. This was not only an external discipline, which predisposed authors to be aware of generic decorum or made them sensitive to the games words could be made to play—although it was also both of those things.

Spenser’s Faerie Queene is the most prominent example in English in which romance and epic have been drawn together in a ‘heroic’ narrative. And yet unlike the Italian poems that were his primary models (and, of them, principally Ariosto’s), he does not for the most part derive meaning from the relation, or competition, of romance and epic. Instead he can give significance to the elements of romance through the highly flexible symbolic system, the allegory, that emerges from them.

In its focus on the solitary knight, romance appears unable or unwilling to conceptualize a larger political world. This difference of concentration, epic on a larger political context and romance on the individual psyche, suggests why the two became bound up with one another in the early modern period.