Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and His Debt to Chaucer
/\GJDWH V0HWULFDO,QYHQWLYHQHVVDQGKLV'HEWWR&KDXFHU 0DUWLQ-'XIIHOO Parergon, Volume 18, Number 1, July 2000, pp. 227-249 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\$XVWUDOLDQDQG1HZ=HDODQG$VVRFLDWLRQRI0HGLHYDO DQG(DUO\0RGHUQ6WXGLHV ,QF DOI: 10.1353/pgn.2000.0038 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pgn/summary/v018/18.1.duffell.html Access provided by Boston College (25 Aug 2015 19:59 GMT) Lydgate's Metrical Inventiveness and his Debt to Chaucer Martin J. Duffell Most modem critics and editors of John Lydgate's work feel it necessary to address the problem of his reputation as a versifier: why did his contemporaries rate him so highly when twentieth-century writers regard him, at best, as idiosyncratic and, at worst, as incompetent? Thus, for example, Saintsbury dismissed him as 'a doggerel poet with an insensitive ear' and Hammond demonstrated that Lydgate's roughness was due, not to ignorant copyists, but to an ignorant poet; 'The study of Lydgate's mentality,' she concluded, 'may not be worth the student's candle.' In the last sixty years a number of writers, from Pyle to Hascall, have made important contributions to our understanding of Lydgate's metrics, but have not succeeded in making us admire his versification. Yet he was the most prolific and admired versifier in England during his own lifetime and for a century after his death. 1 George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, Y.From the Origins to Spenser (London and New York: Macmillan, 1906), p. 223; Eleanor Prescott Hammond, English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1927), p.l 52.
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