This third volume of essays under the title
The Shaping of English Poetry
includes, as in the previous volumes, essays on
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
, Langland, Chaucer and Spenser; it also includes essays on
Beowulf
and Dante. It was never the author’s intention to exclude Old English poetry from the historical continuum of English poetry, and practical rather than ideological considerations explain the absence of
from the two previous volumes. The language of
is in all essentials the language of
and
Piers Plowman
, in one and the same native alliterative tradition, and also the language of Chaucer, in the European tradition inherited from the great French and Italian poets. The transition from
to Dante may seem abrupt, but the poetry of Chaucer, whose assimilation of Italian influences is both formidable and remarkable, requires us to make it. Indeed, the exploration in this volume of Dante’s exposition of love in the
Purgatorio
takes us to the heart of the poetry that we associate with the period of Chaucer’s greatness in the 1380s and 1390s. Here we see not an anachronistic system of courtly love, imposed on medieval poems by modern critics, but distinctions of natural, sensitive and rational love that make sense (among other things) of the ending of
Troilus and Criseyde
as the poem’s logical and persuasive conclusion.