English Alliterative Verse
Poetic Tradition and Literary History

A revisionary account of the 900-year-long history of a major poetic tradition, explored through metrics and literary history.

Eric Weiskott (Author)

9781316620700, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 January 2019

250 pages
23 x 15 x 1.4 cm, 0.35 kg

'The author's major aim is to demonstrate a continuity of 'verse history' for English alliterative poetry from its first recorded appearance in Old English up to its final flowering in a small group of sixteenth-century poems of political prophecy.' Mark Griffith, Notes and Queries

English Alliterative Verse tells the story of the medieval poetic tradition that includes Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, stretching from the eighth century, when English poetry first appeared in manuscripts, to the sixteenth century, when alliterative poetry ceased to be composed. Eric Weiskott draws on the study of meter to challenge the traditional division of medieval English literary history into Old English and Middle English periods. The two halves of the alliterative tradition, divided by the Norman Conquest of 1066, have been studied separately since the nineteenth century; this book uses the history of metrical form and its cultural meanings to bring the two halves back together. In combining literary history and metrical description into a new kind of history he calls 'verse history', Weiskott reimagines the historical study of poetics.

1. Beowulf and verse history
2. Prologues to Old English poetry
3. Lawman, the last Old English poet and the first Middle English poet
4. Prologues to Middle English alliterative poetry
5. The Erkenwald poet's sense of history
6. The alliterative tradition in the sixteenth century.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Poetry [DC]