What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the five-stress line that would become the dominant English verse form of modernity, though it was invented by Chaucer in the 1380s. While this ...

What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the five-stress line that would become the dominant English verse form of modernity, though it was invented by Chaucer in the 1380s. While this ...

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 th...

Unheard Melodies is an essay in comparative poetics. The book draws together readings of fourteenth- and twenty-first-century poetry, from Chaucer and Langland to Claudia Rankine and Ben Lerner, to reframe literary methodologies. Weiskott works through the tension between lineage and family resemblance, between mounting a literary-historical claim to connect old poetry to new and suspending claims of influence in order to draw out similarities in the practice of poetry writing acr...

The compilation Fortunes Stabilnes, the English poetry Charles d'Orléans wrote in the course of his twenty-five year captivity in England after Agincourt, requires a larger lens than that of Chaucerianism, through which ithas most often been viewed. A fresh view from another perspective, one that attends to form and style, as well as to the poet's French traditions, reveals a more conceptually complex and innovative kind of poetry than we have seenuntil now.The essays colle...

The earliest version of William Langland’s Piers Plowman shows this elusive and centrally important fourteenth-century poet inventing the forms that his life’s work will take. Piers Plowman is a sinuous cycle of dream visions in alliterative verse comprehending many aspects of medieval English culture from tavern life, plague, homelessness, and labour politics to religious devotion and theological controversy. At once socially capacious and spiritually electrifying, Langland’s poe...