English Elegies Research Articles

The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats.

The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats.

The Old English Elegies: New Essays in Criticism and Research. Martin Green

<i>The Old English Elegies: New Essays in Criticism and Research</i>. Martin Green

The Old English Elegy as a Genre

The Old English Elegy as a Genre

TRADITION AND INNOVATION IN ALEXANDER BARCLAY'S ‘TOWRE OF VERTUE AND HONOURE’

ET in the fourth of his Eclogues, 'The Towre of Vertue and Honoure' (I513-14) is unique among the works of Alexander Barclay. It represents his only sustained attempt at formal, courtly allegory, if we agree with the consensus of modern critical opinion and reject the ascription to him of 'The Castell of Laboure'.' The 'Towre' is an occasional poem, concerned with the death in battle of Sir Edward Howard, the son of Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, who was soon to become Barclay's patron. Such formal poems are not unusual in the later Middle Ages, and the 'Towre' has received little critical comment. Dr. Beatrice White, editing Barclay's eclogues in 1928, suggested that the inspiration for this poem may have been Jean Lemaire's Temple d'Honneur et de Vertus (I503), but acknowledged that 'Barclay has taken but little detail from Lemaire's Temple'.2 Beyond indicating the likely influence of Lemaire, Dr. White gave little attention to the 'Towre', and did not suggest in what way the poem made its avowed 'claim to originality'. It is the intention in this article to explore Barclay's purpose in writing 'The Towre of Vertue and Honoure', stressing the poet's independence of all the probable sources, and then to examine the place of Barclay's poem in the development of English elegy.

The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats

The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats

“Eager Thought”: Dialectic in Lycidas

Despite its sovereign status among English elegies and within English poetry in general, two strictures upon Lycidas continue in some degree to shadow the poem: the one would hold with Dr. Johnson that its pastoral apparatus is a flaw in terms both of art and of personal expression; the other would agree with G. Wilson Knight that the work lacks order or unity. Both strictures have become increasingly untenable in the light of one type of study which has helped to make reavailable the form and power of the pastoral elegy in itself, and of another type which has marked the structural and affective unity of Milton's poem. Yet some readers still may feel that Milton sets cool pastoral against impassioned personal outcry, and will consider the two modes of expression to be in direct conflict. Milton editors and critics therefore will continue to face the question of unity in Lycidas. Recently Douglas Bush and Merritt Y. Hughes, for example, delivered defenses of the poem in the course of registering adverse charges made against it.

Structural Patterns in the Old English Advent Lyrics

When we talk about the lyric in Old English literature, we are immediately confronted with problems of definition. Some critics have denied that the lyric as a form existed in Old English at all. Others have included virtually all the short poems in the broad category of lyric. The truth is that although most of the shorter poems in Old English do fall into broadly distinguishable types, they do not fit neatly into any of the categories which later periods have distinguished and given latinate form-names. For instance, the term elegy, defined and exemplified in our minds by certain classical poems and applied with some justice to poems like Lycidas and In Memoriam, does not truly characterize any of the socalled Old English elegies. In the case of the lyric, it is very difficult for anyone in the 19th and 20th centuries to define the term without having the romantic lyric in the back of his mind, and the definition he is likely to invent applies rather badly to the seventeenth century devotional poem or the sixteenth century sonnet, even less well to the medieval lyric and not at all, to the various short poems in Old English. I shall not here try to produce a universal definition, but it seems clear to me that the lyric cry andthe spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings are concepts which had best be

Old English Elegies

Old English Elegies

Old English Elegies

Journal Article Old English Elegies Get access Notes and Queries, Volume CLXXI, Issue oct10, 10 October 1936, Pages 269–270, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/CLXXI.oct10.269 Published: 10 October 1936