<i>The Shapes of Early English Poetry: Style, Form, History</i>. Edited by Irina Dumitrescu and Eric Weiskott. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2019. Pp. xi+281.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Shapes of Early English Poetry: Style, Form, History. Edited by Irina Dumitrescu and Eric Weiskott. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2019. Pp. xi+281.Andrew GallowayAndrew GallowayCornell University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis consistently astute and innovative set of essays is dedicated to Roberta Frank by former students and others who intersected with her during her “Yale years,” 2000–2019 (a previous volume by colleagues and former students at Toronto honored her Toronto period).1 Judging both by the acknowledgments and the range of approaches here, hers was a vital and many-sided mentorship. The essays here cultivate more explicit and varied theoretical apparatuses than Frank’s own historically learned, often witty, and always deftly suggestive essays on “style” and poetics; the volume’s showcasing of methods is one of its most useful features. On offer are metrics, lexical generativity, performativity, phenomenology, sound studies, and “object-oriented ontology” (OOO), all deployed with high self-consciousness and acuity and applied to medieval English poetry from The Wanderer to Lydgate’s Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Mary, with additional forays into the feminist provocations of Meghan Purvis’s 2013 translation of Beowulf, and an OOO approach to Old Norse kennings.The editors’ introduction aims highest theoretically, at least in level of generality. The introduction offers provocative but rather coy labels to group the essays, dividing them into “seasons,” “engines,” and “discordance.” The first category signals discussions of temporality or meaningful anachronism (“time, trauma, and retrospection,” as the editors say [5]); the second, elements or principles of poetic generativity; the last, “discordance,” effects with “unintended consequences”: the textual or poetic properties that can’t be fully controlled by the systems that the poems create. These labels are intriguing, though some seem transferable to other essays in the volume than those they enclose. “Discordance” might, though it does not, have included Mary Kate Hurley’s essay on The Wanderer’s temporalities, with its focus on conflict between repetitive personal memories and impersonal linear time, a view informed by both Paul Ricoeur and Augustine (25), with further debts to trauma theory. “Discordance” is applied not only to Jordan Zweck’s use of sound studies to follow unclassifiable sounds in Exodus (though those turn out not to be discordant so much as multipurpose) but also Andrew Kraebel’s lucid discussion of the unusually discrete poetic units of Lydgate’s Joys and Sorrows, which Kraebel shows both sprang from Lydgate’s religious performative uses of the poem and in turn, Kraebel reasons, led to the poem’s major textual corruption at an early stage of copying. Kraebel doesn’t linger on the contexts and historical interest of this typically Lydgatian intersection of living performative ritual with rearrangeable (and easily losable) textual nuggets, but his exposition is impeccably precise.“Discordance” is also used to include Irina Dumitrescu’s essay on cannibalism in the Old English Andreas and the late fourteenth-century Siege of Jerusalem. Daringly leaping across a half millennium or more, Dumitrescu’s inquiry connects eating one’s own kind with textual consumption, the visible cannibalizing of poetic antecedents to gain power, though by cannibalizing a predecessor a poem also risks relinquishing some of its own identity. Her point is that spolia, the “found art” of such medieval versions of Marcel Duchamp, has a way of running its own show. Objects again turn out to have agency and power of their own, theoretically anchored by Dumitrescu’s use of what Denis Ferhatovic has elsewhere considered “spolia-inflected poetics” (215).That suggests other kinds of connections across the volume, wider principles of current criticism beyond those that the introduction brings into view. Ferhatovic’s essay in this volume deploys a different but in some ways analogously disruptive method in treating Purvis’s translation of Beowulf (Purviswulf), as an instance of translations showing “feminist ruptures that produce plurality and polyphony that challenge the original” (60). This takes “spolia-inflected poetics” into the domain of gender’s status and social modalities, the only essay to consider the social implications of poetics directly.The introduction briefly notes that the volume merges historicist and formalist approaches through “literary texture” (2); though a bland phrase, used once, this points to the volume’s real cumulative pursuit. For the materiality of “texture” describes better than “style” the volume’s focus on such topics as the worlds that the poems create and the fields of decorum they inhabit, as well as, sometimes, the worlds the poems bump up against—almost literally so, for instance, in Andrew Johnston’s essay on the stray objects from the wrong cultural universes jutting into Beowulf. These encounters, Johnston argues, keep that poem from offering a fully knowable or culturally unified world, whether Germanic, post-Roman, or Christian, and in turn, Johnston observes, insure that Beowulf defeats persistently Whig interpretations of national history. Objects also take over in the case of the unmanageable agency of skaldic kennings that Christopher Abram relates to OOO: such kennings demonstrate the mysterious half visibility of objects, including the objects that human beings are, and in ways that cannot be “solved” by any mere equivalence in plain speech. Kennings, like metaphors, must remain puzzles, must resist static glossing, in order for their poems to function (165, 167).It’s no surprise that in their overt discussions of approach, these essays range far from Frank’s theoretically understated criticism while still centering on the questions of poetics with which her writings have been associated. Instead of “style,” “shapes,” or “forms,” or even instead of “literary texture,” a better cumulative rubric might be materialist poetics, so long as that is understood to involve generativity and degenerativity, transformation and dialectic. Under materialist poetics, though not a term that appears in this volume, might fall not only the essays already mentioned but also Emily Thornbury’s immaculately precise treatment of varieties of “light verse” in Old English, which shows certain poets’ wit by the attention they draw to meter as a material constraint, forcing words to be “melted down and recast in any form necessary” under the force of blatant metrical artifice, with more parallels to Ogden Nash than nineteenth-century ideas of heroic Old English epic (87). Under materialist poetics might also fall Sarah Novacich’s proposal that the poems in the Pearl manuscript present not precious attestations of otherwise unrecorded rare words but the “engine” for recasting new words as the Patience poet goes along (139). The same rubric might hold Eric Weiskott’s study of alliterative meter in The Paris Psalter, which places it along a vast, Yakovlevian span of alliterative poetics, in which Weiskott shows we might more logically center the copious (and mostly unpalatable) verse of The Paris Psalter than Beowulf or Piers Plowman—a salutary defamiliarizing of a massive span of metrical history. One might compare Weiskott’s use of The Paris Psalter to how Norman Davies’s Europe: A History (1996) makes Poland the center of Europe; what we think of as the “center” of anything depends on what elements we choose to see as supporting our own cultural—or in Weiskott’s example, metrical—values and capacities for appreciation.All these essays show that medieval poetics at present, under whatever name or term (and the volume’s title gives us several others to choose from), is neither a tidy nor settled business. The connections between these essays’ many new approaches are not fully anatomized or thematized here, nor need they be. What makes this collection particularly exciting are the openings and overviews of many new kinds of formalist and materialist poetics that are given new theorizations and applications, linked by discernable though not always directly retraceable paths to Frank’s inimitably deft and witty studies. Notes 1. Antonina Harbus and Russell Poole, eds., Verbal Encounters: Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse Studies for Roberta Frank (University of Toronto Press, 2005). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 1August 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709586 Views: 504Total views on this site HistoryPublished online June 18, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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