The Poetic Field, I

Abstract

Abstract The ‘Middle’ phase in the story of English often impresses us as a period of enormous change and diversity. This chapter introduces the continuities as well as the differences between Old and Middle English, and explores some of the ways in which Middle English varied—through time and across space, and in the range of origins represented by its word forms. The main focus is on texts at the so-called ‘transition’ from Old English to Middle English, with case studies of the linguistic resources and expressive choices of two twelfth-century poems from opposite sides of England, the Soul’s Address to the Body and the Ormulum. The chapter then moves forwards in time and asks what an examination of language means for our appreciation of the poetic qualities of two famous literary monuments of the later fourteenth century, the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and of the Gawain-poet.