keyword: Thomas Campbell
Thomas Campbell
- Thomas Campbell and the Unmaking of John Gower
Issue: Leeds Medieval Studies, 4 (2024)
Until relatively recently, John Gower had a claim to be one of the authors most dramatically fallen from favour in all of English literature. Following the indifference of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century readers, a fate which befell most medieval English authors, Gower received a disdainful dressing-down in the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell’s much-reprinted anthology Specimens of the British Poets (1819). Campbell objects to the moral opportunism, religious ceremony, and poetic design of Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Isolating Campbell’s dispraise as a pivotal episode in Gower’s postmedieval reception, this article draws comparisons to other contemporary responses to Gower’s poetry — many of them warmer than Campbell’s. Among the sour judgements upon Gower at the turn of the nineteenth century, it is argued that Campbell’s was the one that made the most difference. Nineteenth-century appreciation for Gower’s trilingual poetic art was hampered by lyricization, that is, the process by which readers came to conflate lyric with poetry in general, coupled with the ideology of monolingual nationalism.