In Chaucer's Shadow

...Its central issues are with us today: How to treat our neighbors, or the social responsibilities of those privileged with great wealth or abilities...

...The artistic power of Piers Plowman is impossible to demonstrate in a review like this, but I must mention its dazzling puns, the enigmatic transformations of major characters (such as Piers himself), and the provocative entrances of characters like the Roman emperor Trajan, who bursts from Hell scorning Scripture herself: "Baw [bah] for books...

...This is a good example of Bow-ers's daring critical originality, and he announces a forthcoming study on the topic...

...The linguistic peculiarities of Piers Plowman are now made easier by a recent facing-face text and translation edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen Shepherd and published by Norton...

...Piers Plowman remains the greatest unread (or at least under-read) poem in our language...

...Piers Plowman is a poem by an intellectual for intellectuals, but the poem provides no easy answers...

...Langland's Piers Plowman slightly C. David Benson, professor of English at the University of Connecticut, is the author, most recently, of Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture...

...but Chaucer appeals immediately because of his sly wit...

...Bowers argues that the differing reputations that came to be associated with Chaucer and Langland began with their own choices...

...Chaucer and Langland is a serious scholarly study, packed with generous—sometimes, perhaps, too generous—responses to the work of other academics, and is packed with valuable information, especially about manuscript, printing, and political history...

...But to many who make the effort to hear its special music, it has no equal in English literature...

...Thus, with a characteristic combination of social connections and good luck, Chaucer became the first occupant of what would become Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey, while Langland became the "Father of English Literary Dissent...

...In contrast, Chaucer often promotes his name and his works through various self-references in his poetry...

...In Chaucer's Shadow William Langland, Piers Plowman,' and the dawn of English poetry by C. David Benson English literature, as we know it, begins with the works of two great poets who wrote in London during the second half of the 14th century: Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland...

...A Medieval Mystery...

...Chaucer is still some part of our culture: Pier Paolo Pasolini made a scandalous movie of the Canterbury Tales in the 1970s and the novelist/ historian Peter Ackroyd has just published a brief biography of him...

...He answers this not by a close analysis of the works of either writer: His is more of a cultural than a literary study, though it is illuminated by the stimulating insights of a sensitive reader...

...Langland constantly revisits and complicates its vexed questions, such as the rival claims of justice and mercy...

...Yet Bowers's learning is lightened by clear, lively writing and the frank willingness to speculate about matters not susceptible to proof...

...Significant 15th-century poets, including Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, extol Chaucer as their model, as does Edmund Spenser more tacitly...

...In contrast, the "Langland Tradition" largely consists of some marginal 15th-century poems of protest...

...Bowers observes that Chaucer's apparently devout Retractions to the Canterbury Tales cleverly combines a concern for his soul with a catalogue of his literary works...

...In a final speech, Holy Church declares that, without good works, even her own church services are as worthless as a wench's maidenhood "that no man desireth" and, in what might be considered a medieval bumper sticker, or sound bite, on the importance of Christian love: "Chastite withoute charite," she says, deserves to be "cheyned in hell...

...At the end of Chaucer and Langland, Bowers presents another neglected historical detail, noting that the father of America's first great poet, Anne Bradstreet, carried a copy of Piers Plowman to the New World, thus making Langland the "unacknowledged progenitor of an American literary tradition" that shares his spiritual restlessness and search for social reform and self-definition...

...And John M. Bowers's new study will excite interest in the early history of the reception of Chaucer and Langland, and should inspire some—perhaps many!—to seek out the riches of these two magnificent poets...

...One of Bowers's most intriguing speculations is based on the fact that, a year before he died, Chaucer took a 53-year lease on a house in a garden of Westminster Abbey, a lease later controlled by his son Thomas until his death more than 30 years later...

...He is a wonderful storyteller who, especially in the Canterbury Tales, presents us with memorable characters and stories for any taste: from epic romance, to personal confession, to bawdy comedy, to devout saint's life...

...Langland's focus on English social and religious controversies made his poetry seem increasingly narrow and sectarian, whereas Chaucer cannily evaded domestic entanglements...

...Chaucer and Langland were the first native poets to achieve a national reputation, and the large number of their surviving manuscripts testifies to a wide popularity with contemporary readers...

...They proved that English verse could rival that on the continent: French romances and dream-visions and the vernacular achievements of Dante and Boccaccio...

...An early personification in the poem, Holy Church, has a name that promises dry doctrine...

...And for all of his engagement with Christianity, some of Langland's best modern critics have been unbelievers, for the poem is neither mystical nor a work of religious instruction...

...But Langland is lucky if even students of literature know his name and that of his life's work...

...Scornful insult of the narrator ("doted daffe" [doltish fool]) is followed by a beautifully metaphysical passage on Christ's Incarnation that dazzlingly combines plant, medicinal, food, and political images...

...Bowers declares that modern readers "seldom admit great enjoyment" from reading Piers and that "probably no undergraduate has wished it longer...

...Both wrote in an older English which, like a strong foreign accent, takes some getting used to...

...Bowers proposes that Thomas, who was closely associated with King Henry IV and his royal successors, used the tenement as an archive for his father's surviving manuscripts, a center for their editing, copying, and circulation...

...Langland's poetry is especially distinguished by its stunning stylistic variety...

...There is a salutary recognition that historical reconstruction, especially of such a distant period, is always an exercise in connecting somewhat shadowy dots...

...Instead, it addresses the difficulties of ordinary people trying to do well in the everyday world...

...Many modern readers know something about Chaucer's most famous work, the Canterbury Tales, and its many outrageous characters, such as the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner...

...instead, it offers the puzzles of paradox and enigmatic images...

...Indeed, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, poetic contemporaries as different as Chaucer and Langland, might profitably be compared to William Langland...

...Whether (as Bowers believes) Langland's striking anonymity—his very name was a matter of dispute through the 19th century and his biography remains almost wholly imaginary—was a deliberate attempt to avoid persecution, the lack of a definable author made Piers Plowman harder to canonize, and more available to later appropriation by contesting factions...

...That may be true for some, and Piers will probably always remain a special taste...

...precedes Chaucer's works and seems to have influenced the younger poet, but soon the reputations of these two pioneers began to diverge...

...This effort of dissemination was undertaken not from filial devotion or artistic taste but as a "quasi-official project" on behalf of the Lancastrian cause, whose legitimacy remained questionable after Henry IV's deposition of Richard II...

...Jusserand, the French ambassador to Washington and author of the first critical study of Langland...

...Although not Bowers's primary focus here, the value of both Chaucer and Langland must ultimately rest on their artistry...

...While Chaucer was saluted by John Dryden as the "Father of English Poetry," Langland, long treated as a neglected literary stepchild, is today likely to appear more often in a History than an English course...

...And what about the fact that Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of Piers, and that Theodore Roosevelt discussed both Chaucer and Langland in the White House with J.J...

...By contrast, readers of Chaucer coming to Piers Plowman are often put off by the alliterative poem's length (which is not easily excerpted) as well as by its allegory, interrupted narratives, and moral seriousness...

...Chaucer was one of the earliest books printed (in 1478) by England's first printer, William Cax-ton, and many new editions followed, whereas Piers Plowman did not appear in print until 1550 (introduced as a piece of Protestant propaganda) and then, after a couple of reprints, was not edited again until 1813...

...Although well-supported by factual evidence, his overall narrative is, he says "admittedly fabricated," and frequently cites the popular, even sensational, book by five serious scholars led by the former Monty Pythoner Terry Jones: Who Murdered Chaucer...

...and Shakespeare will adapt Chaucer's Knight's Tale (as A Midsummer Night's Dream) and Troilus and Criseyde...

...Piers Plowman is difficult, but that is precisely what produces its singular pleasures, like the demanding delights of modern artists like James Joyce (his Ulysses, not Finnegans Wake), Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard...

...Some of these are as startling as they are thought-provoking, such as his observation that Piers Plowman's outraged chronicling of contemporary corruption might be considered a forerunner of "gonzo journalism...

...In this innovative and readable new book, John Bowers begins with the simple question of why Chaucer and not Langland achieved the position of English poetical patriarch...

...but her speech is anything but dull...