Before Prosody: Early English Poetics in Practice and Theory

Abstract

AbstractSince the sixteenth century, the history of English poetics has had two sides: a history of theory and a history of practice. Contemporary literary scholars are mapping new connections between the history of theory and the history of practice, under the rubric of “historical poetics.” Thus far historical poetics has been most strongly associated with the study of nineteenth-century poetry. This essay takes a longer view onto the histories of English poetry from the perspective of early English verse. Medieval English poets practiced literary form at a time when vernacular poetics had not yet become an academic subject or a sustained cultural discourse. This essay offers medieval English poetry as a case in point for historical poetics, thereby bringing a different literary archive to bear on methodological debates about the historical study of poetics. Three case studies, centered on alliterative verse, explore what is distinctive about the cultural work of early English poetics.