Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century

Chaucer and his French contemporaries: Natural music in the fourteenth century

Literature & Fiction

Wimsatt, James I.

Poetry

University of Toronto Press

This detailed study argues that Chaucer was heavily influenced by 14th-century French literature, and contemporary French culture, and that this provides a whole new fresh perspective from which to approach Chaucer's works. All French extracts are accompanied by an English translation.

Chaucer and His French Contemporaries

History & Criticism

Although virtually unknown in his lifetime, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is counted today among the great nineteenth-century poets. His poetry was collected and published posthumously by his friend Robert Bridges in 1917, and subsequently Hopkins's reputation flowered, though more as a modern writer than as Victorian, and very little as a poetic theorist. Yet the body of Hopkins's critical writing reveals sharp insight into the subject of poetics, and presents an innovative theory that locates primary poetic meaning in 'figures of speech sound.' 
These 'figures of speech sound' provide the focus for James I. Wimsatt's erudite and original study. Drawing from Hopkins's diaries, letters, student essays, and correspondence with poet-friends, Wimsatt illuminates Hopkins's theory that the sound of poetic language carries an emotional, not merely logical and grammatical, meaning. Wimsatt concentrates his study on Hopkins's writings about 'sprung rhythm,' 'lettering,' and 'inscape,' - his coinages - and makes abundant reference to Hopkins's verse, showing how it exemplifies his language theory. A well-researched and highly detailed book, Hopkins's Poetics of Speech Sound asserts major significance for a relatively neglected aspect of this important poet's writings.

Hopkins's Poetics of Speech Sound: Sprung Rhythm, Lettering, Inscape

James I. Wimsatt edits Guillaume de Machaut's important Dit de la fleur de lis et de la Marguerite; he identifies an acrostic connecting the earlier Dit de la Marguerite and Complainte VI with the crusader Pierre of Cyprus; and he established a probable historical framework for the three poems.

The Marguerite Poetry of Guillaume de Machaut (North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 87)

UNC Department of Romance Studies

Chaucer and the poems of "Ch" in University of Pennsylvania MS French 15 (Chaucer studies)

Reference

Rowman Littlefield

On several counts, one particular collection of French lyrics made in France in the late fourteenth century, University of Pennsylvania MS 15, is the most likely repository of Chaucer's French poems. It is the largest manuscript anthology extant of fourteenth-century French lyrics in the formes fixes (balade, rondeaux, virelay, lay, and five-stanza chanson) with by far the largest number of works of unknown authorship.

Chaucer and the Poems of 'Ch' (Teams Middle English Texts)

Medieval Institute Publications

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