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John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century

John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century LITTLE REVIEWS Peter Malkin, ed., Basil Bunting on Poetry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 252 pp. In quirky lectures given at Durham University near the end of his life, Basil Bunting revised the canon. In this collection he elevates poets, beginning with Wyatt, whose rhythms originate in song and dance; and he demotes those for whom meter consists of counting. Amplifying Pound’s assertion that poets should compose by the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome, Bunting bewails the moment when poets replaced musicality with the rule of neatness: “If a poet starts counting syllables and heeding the rules prosodists invent, writing verses becomes a pedantic game on a par with crossword puzzles.” Although “free verse” has become “bad prose, chopped up,” Whitman figures importantly in this canon. The realignment Bunting suggests is thus astonishing but also persuasive. — Belle Randall doi 10.1215/0961754X-2007-078 Karen A. Winstead, John Capgrave’s Fifteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 233 pp. The title of this book is judiciously chosen. The self-fulfilling belief that fifteenthcentury English literature was beneath serious critical notice has crumbled as one writer after another — Lydgate, Hoccleve, Margery Kempe — has been read with http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Common Knowledge Duke University Press

John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century

Cooper, Helen
Common Knowledge , Volume 14 (2) – Apr 1, 2008
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Publisher
Duke University Press
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© 2008 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0961-754X
eISSN
0961-754X
DOI
10.1215/0961754X-2007-079
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Abstract

LITTLE REVIEWS Peter Malkin, ed., Basil Bunting on Poetry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 252 pp. In quirky lectures given at Durham University near the end of his life, Basil Bunting revised the canon. In this collection he elevates poets, beginning with Wyatt, whose rhythms originate in song and dance; and he demotes those for whom meter consists of counting. Amplifying Pound’s assertion that poets should compose by the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome, Bunting bewails the moment when poets replaced musicality with the rule of neatness: “If a poet starts counting syllables and heeding the rules prosodists invent, writing verses becomes a pedantic game on a par with crossword puzzles.” Although “free verse” has become “bad prose, chopped up,” Whitman figures importantly in this canon. The realignment Bunting suggests is thus astonishing but also persuasive. — Belle Randall doi 10.1215/0961754X-2007-078 Karen A. Winstead, John Capgrave’s Fifteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 233 pp. The title of this book is judiciously chosen. The self-fulfilling belief that fifteenthcentury English literature was beneath serious critical notice has crumbled as one writer after another — Lydgate, Hoccleve, Margery Kempe — has been read with

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Common Knowledge – Duke University Press

Published: Apr 1, 2008

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