Ex Libris: John Gower's Vox Clamantis

Before we tackle the first millenium and a half of our National Literature, we must start in medias res with the 14th century. Time was, a critics' generation or so ago, when the main English authors of the late Middle English period were accounted Chaucer and Gower. It has now become fashionable, for obscure reasons,** to drop Gower and substitute the poet of the Sir Gawain piece in our critical estimation.

** Can you say suppression of an ethnic and linguistic tradition? I knew you could. Poets who write in French and Latin against the horrors of a Peasant Revolt have too much of Them against Us about them, for the modern Marxist-Lollard English Prof. But Arthurian legend is safely enough tucked away in the Distant Mirror, as opposed to some other rather closer and more subversive Mirrour.

Here, in any event, is what the CHEAL has to say--all it has to say--about Gower's 10,000 line achievement, a classic of the Anglo-Latin tradition and far the largest production of the late Medieval period, the Vox Clamantis:

http://www.bartleby.com/212/0605.html

And here are Gower's works online (including about 1% of the Vox Clamantis that has been transcribed):

http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/gowerbib.htm

Now, name a National Tradition of the English, with an epic 10,000 line work, by a poet of the critical stature of Chaucer, that gets Anglo-Latin Tradtion, the Tradition That Must Not Be Named, lest the ghosts of the Desdichados haunt us (not that Saxons are superstitious about things like that). Hey, it got its 5 column inches of CHEAL. What more can you ask?

Me, I think we should make our Graduate students read it before given them a Philosophiae Doctor, Barbi Causa.

The first 20%, or some 2000 lines, is a thinly-veiled description of the peasant's revolt of 1381. It was, perhaps, pre-pended to the rest of the text after the fact. In the CHEAL's majestic two paragraphs, they manage to quote not a single of the offending lines. Hey, Winston, we got another one for the Memory Hole. What is Latin for Double plus refs un-persons?