The Columbia History of British Poetry by Carl Woodring, James Shapiro Read Free Book Online

largely Chaucer's own work that placed London English at the center of the literary map. In Chaucer's day there were other ways of speaking and writing that did not carry the connotations that "dialect literature" has for us today: they are not necessarily the derisively recorded utterances of an underclass, or the evocations of a quaint nostalgic rusticity. Chaucer is the first writer in English to make jokes about other dialects of English (the Reeve's Tale)perhaps in the literary circles of the royal court regional speech already sounded rustic and comicbut even in the fifteenth century regional writers themselves show little self-consciousness about their provincial speech. It is only by the end of the century with the emergence of printing that the descendant of Chaucer's London dialect becomes a definite standard, the Scots dialect of the neighboring kingdom its only rival for literary purposes. It is hard today to read "dialect literature" without the distraction of modern prejudices about standard English; but West Midland or Kentish speech was not quaint to its users, nor treated condescendingly by regional authors.
Poetry precedes literacy, and exists outside it, but nothing except speculation can tell us anything about unrecorded verse. What remains is only what was written down; and writing put English in the ambit of a very different culture. Literacy was bound up with a set of literary and cultural assumptions, sacred and profane texts written in Latin, and

 

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ideas about literature derived from Christian learning. When a man learned to read and write (women mostly did not), he learned not only in Latin, but within the scheme of the Latin learned establishment. English, in the world of written texts, was also necessarily inside the educational value system that went with literacy. Medieval schools existed to teach Latin to potential clerics; the development of the Latin word ydiota from its early sense of "uneducated, illiterate person," to the meaning "lay, not clerical," to its present sense of "idiot" reflects accurately a medieval sense of values.
Medieval learning, like medieval everything else, was profoundly hierarchical. The educational system was envisioned (and sometimes portrayed) as a vast pyramid or tower to which the key was Latin grammar. From grammar one ideally proceeded to the other liberal arts (logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) and eventually through philosophy to theology, the queen of all knowledge. It was, in some senses, a closed system; closed temporally, since human history was held to be finite, beginning in the garden of Eden and ending at Judgment Day. It was closed spatially too, since the earth was the center of the physical universe, and heaven lay outside the sphere of the fixed stars. Mankind's place at the material center was offset by being at the spiritual periphery. The ideal scheme of things had been radically altered by the original sin committed in the garden of Eden; Adam was held to have been created with a knowledge of all seven liberal arts as his own proper inheritance. Adam's Fall had ruined the arts (together with the human constitution, the animal kingdom, and the weather), but education could try to repair some of the damage; learning was seen as the first step in restoration. Man must be mindful that the perceptible world of the senses is only a stage in existence: his goal is the immaterial and spiritual world that he must learn to perceive in the chaos of earthly life.
Poetry fitted awkwardly inside this system of education. It was not per se a liberal art; nor was there any category for literature: both appeared bewilderingly in several different places. Grammar students might study prosody or comment on turns of expression, and they used Latin texts ranging from mnemonic verses to classical poetry. Poetry's use of figures of speech put it within the territory of rhetoric. One of the astronomical textbooks was written in