A Rhyme Distribution Chronology of John Gower's Latin Poetry

• Published in: Studies in philology Vol. 104; no. 1; pp. 15 - 55
• Main Author: Carlson, David R.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press 2007; The University of North Carolina Press
• Subjects: Couplets; Elegies; English literature; Epigrams; Hexameter; Latin language; Linguistics; Literary criticism; Literary style; Pentameter; Philology; Poetic meter; Poetry; Poets; Rhyme; Writing
• ISSN: 0039-3738; 1543-0383; 1543-0383
• DOI: 10.1353/sip.2007.0000

Fulfillment of the literary ambitions he eventually conceived for himself and his work necessitated for Gower writing in Latin; eventually too, their fulfillment seems also for Gower to have necessitated writing rhymed Latin verse in the canonical high poetic style, to the authority of which Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus, for example, a century later, each in his own way, also still had to defer.48 From this literary-historical perspective, the events of 1399, rather than causing Gower to develop the late style he used in the Cronica tripertita, only gave him opportunity to assert, by means of the Cronica tripertita, a claim to have achieved as much as there was to achieve as a Latin poet.