John Gower

John Gower 1332-1408 Kentish poet

1. A contemporary of William Langland and Pearl Poet. and personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer.
2. Chaucer dedicated his Troilus and Crisedye in part to moral Gower ( Chaucer called him Moral Gower)
3. He is remembered primarily for three major works, the Mirour de l’Omme, Vox Clamantis, and Confessio Amantis, three long poems written in French, Latin, and English respectively, which are united by common moral and political themes.
4. List of works
   1. French Career
      1. Mirour de l’Omme, or Speculum Hominis, or Speculum Meditantis (French, c.1376–1379) / The Mirror of Mankind in Octasyllables
   2. Latin Career
      1. Vox Clamantis (Latin, c.1377–1381): Deals with the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 led by Wat Taylor. Gower did not support the peasants.
   3. English Career
      1. Confessio Amantis (English, c.1386–1393) or A Lover’s Confession: Written in Middle English dialect
         1. Story: He uses stories to recount the seven deadly sins of love (Amans), in a mock religious dream vision.
   4. Others
      1. Traité pour essampler les amants marietz (French, 1397)
      2. Cinkante Balades (French, 1399–1400)
      3. Cronica Tripertita (Latin, c.1400)
      4. In praise of peace (English, c.1400)
5. Gower’s verse is by turns religious, political, historical, and moral—though he has been narrowly defined as “moral Gower” ever since Chaucer graced him with the epithet.[21]:line 1856 His primary mode is allegory, although he shies away from sustained abstractions in favour of the plain style of the raconteur.
6. His earliest works were probably ballades in Anglo-Norman French, some of which may have later been included in his work the Cinkante Ballades. The first work which has survived is in the same language, however: it is the Speculum Meditantis, also known by the French title Mirour de l’Omme, a poem of just under 30,000 lines, containing a dense exposition of religion and morality. According to Yeager “Gower’s first intent to write a poem for the instructional betterment of king and court, at a moment when he had reason to believe advice about social reform might influence changes predictably to take place in an expanded jurisdiction, when the French and English peoples were consolidated under a single crown.”
7. Gower’s second major work, the Vox Clamantis, was written in Latin. The first book has an allegorical account of the Peasants’ Revolt which begins as an allegory, becomes quite specific and ends with an allusion to William Walworth’s suppression of the rebels.[5]:xxxiv-xl Gower takes the side of the aristocracy but the actions of Richard II are described by “the captain in vain endeavoured to direct the ship’s course”.[5]:xxxixSubsequent books decry the sins of various classes of the social order: priests, friars, knights, peasants, merchants, lawyers. The last two books give advice to King Richard II and express the poet’s love for England.[5]:xxx-lvii As Gower admits,[23] much of Vox Clamantis was borrowed from other authors. Macaulay refers to this as “schoolboy plagiarism”[5]:xxxii Peter classifies Mirour and Vox as “complaint literature” in the vein of Langland.
8. His third work is the Confessio Amantis, a 30,000-line poem in octosyllabic English couplets, which makes use of the structure of a Christian confession (presented allegorically as a confession of sins against Love) as a narrative frame within which a multitude of individual tales are told.:I.203–288 Like his previous works, the theme is very much morality, even where the stories themselves have a tendency to describe rather immoral behaviour. One scholar asserts that Confessio Amantis “almost exclusively” made Gower’s “poetic reputation.”[25]
9. Fisher views the three major works as “one continuous work” with In Praise of Peace as a capstone. There is “movement from the courtly tone of the Cinkante Balades to the moral and philosophical tone of the Traitie.” Leland [26] (ca 1540) [19]:Fisher translation 136 states “that the three works were intended to present a systematic discourse upon the nature of man and society.”
10. They provide as organized and unified a view as we have of the social ideals on England upon the eve of the Renaissance. This view may be subsumed under the three broad headings: individual VIRTUE, legal JUSTICE, and the administrative responsibility of the KING. The works progress from the description of the origins of sin and the nature of the vices and virtues at the beginning of the Mirour de l’omme, through consideration of social law and order in the discussion of the three estates in the Mirour and Vox Clamatis, to a final synthesis of royal responsibiity of Empedoclean love in the Confessio Amantis.
11. In later years Gower published a number of minor works in all three languages: the Cinkante Ballades, a series of French ballades on romantic subjects. Yeager (2011) argues that these sonnets were composed throughout Gower’s lifetime.
12. the English poem In Praise of Peace “is a political poem in which Gower, as a loyal subject of Henry IV, approves his coronation, admires him as the saviour of England, dilates on the evil of war and the blessing of peace, and finally begs him to display clemency and seek domestic peace”[28]:106 Fisher argued that it was “Gower’s last important poem. It sums up the final twenty years of both his literary career and his literary achievement.” short Latin works on various subjects with several poems addressed to the new Henry IV. According to Yeager (2005) “his final metered thoughts were in Latin, the language that Gower, like most of his contemporaries, associated with timeless authority.”[29]Critics have speculated on which late work triggered the royal wine allowance mentioned in the Life section. Candidates are Cronica tripertita,[9][30]:26 In Praise of Peace,[31]:85 O Recolende[32] or an illustrated presentation copy of Confessio with dedication to Henry IV.[33] According to Meyer-Lee “no known evidence relates the collar or grant [of wine] to his literary activity.”
13. Gower’s poetry has had a mixed critical reception. In the 16th century, he was generally regarded alongside Chaucer as the father of English poetry.[16]:ix In the 18th and 19th centuries, however, his reputation declined, largely on account of a perceived didacticism and dullness; e.g. the American poet and critic James Russell Lowell claimed Gower “positively raised tediousness to the precision of science”.[35]:329 After publication of Macaulay’s edition (1901) of the complete works,[16] he has received more recognition, notably by C. S. Lewis (1936),[36] Wickert (1953),[37] Fisher (1964),[19] Yeager (1990) [38] and Peck (2006). [39] However, he has not obtained the same following or critical acceptance as Geoffrey Chaucer.