Didactic Poetry as Formal Experiment in Early Medieval England
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Thornbury, Emily
Abstract
The poems termed “didactic” in the Old English corpus defy our efforts to like them. This loosely-defined category of texts is named for a perceived eagerness to teach, in which conventionality and bluntness seem to overbalance poetic qualities. Yet these poems have a largely-overlooked formal inventiveness that unsettles single-dimensional readings, and which challenges our assumptions about literary value. This dissertation argues that Old English didactic poetry requires us to perceive the technical constraints of verse as constitutive of, rather than apart from, the poetry’s moral purpose. Experimental in its own approach, my project stages conversations between Old English and medieval Chinese material from the Liang Dynasty to the Tang (6th to early 10th centuries), to spark new ways of understanding the goals of Old English formal inventiveness. My first chapter opens with the Liang Dynasty primer Qianzi wen, to irritate deep-seated assumptions of what a didactic poem might mean or wish to do. In one swift turn, the Qianzi wen turns the moral foreground of instruction into background, and reveals the technicality of language to be the text’s primary purpose rather than merely its incidental medium. This provocation makes possible fresh readings of the Old English Rune Poem and Precepts, showing how each uses restrictive formal requirements to transform the simple moral dicta on the surface. The second chapter turns from small elements of the word and morpheme to the larger scale of the poetic formula. I read The Fortunes of Men with the mid-Tang poet Meng Jiao, to ask why a didactic poem might purposively stage its own failure to find clarity. In the hands of these poets, the constraint and foreshadowing of poetic formulas emerge as tools for simulating the partiality of human knowledge. Where the didactic is oft elided with a mode of blunt assertion, this chapter foregrounds the ways poets valued and shaped the gradual and not-always-linear process toward understanding. The third chapter finally moves from comparative readings between Old English and Chinese poetry, to center comparative moves within Old English and Chinese poetry. Reading Maxims I alongside Tang Dynasty regulated verse, I show how the praxis and theorization of parallel couplets in the Chinese tradition — especially in their aesthetic preferences for asymmetry within symmetry — can help us read more capaciously and more precisely the work Maxims I seeks to do by shaping its wisdom in parallel pairs. Through these paired readings, this dissertation shows the way Old English poets leveraged innovative textual forms not only to contain knowledge, but further to help readers attend carefully to life and to language in ways not necessarily confined by a fixed sense of order. Building out such shoptalk between Old English and Chinese poets who were never in contact serves to look beyond Old Norse, Old Irish, and Latin analogues as the primary mode of explanation. Together, they also break open the very idea of the didactic, to both interrogate the category while constellating new possibilities at the intersections of wisdom, aesthetic experience, and literary form.
Recommended Citation
Luo, Shu-han, "Didactic Poetry as Formal Experiment in Early Medieval England" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1191.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1191
