Poetry: Medieval & Renaissance Poetry

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
At the round earth's imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels; and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go. MORE

From The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature
The collection of the Canterbury Tales was evidently undertaken soon after Geoffrey Chaucer ceased to serve as controller of customs in 1386. MORE

From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
A collection of 228 troubadour songs in Latin and German, discovered in 1803 by Freiherr Christoph von Arentin in the monastery of Benedikt Beuren, about 60 miles south of Munich. Dating from the early 13th century, they are a mixture of moral-satirical texts, love lyrics (some of them very sexually explicit) and drinking songs. MORE

From The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature
La Chanson de Roland is the earliest of the more than one hundred extant Old French epics. It survives in seven complete manuscripts; the oldest is in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and is dated 1130-50. The Oxford manuscript is a copy. MORE

From Brewer's Curious Titles An epic poem by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), who completed it in 1321, just before his death. The original title was simply Commedia (Italian, ‘ play’), and it was not until after the 16th century that it became known as the Divina Commedia. There are three parts, Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio and Paradiso.

A tragedy by William Shakespeare, first performed c. 1601. A bad, perhaps pirated, Quarto (Q1) was published in 1603. Modern editors use a second Quarto (Q2), published in 1604, and the text in the First Folio of 1623. MORE

From The Bloomsbury Dictionary of English Literature
Attributed to William Langland, Piers Plowman is a major alliterative narrative poem, composed in the later 14th century and extant in three versions, conventionally known as the A, B and C texts. It is now generally accepted that Langland is responsible for each of these versions. MORE

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Allegory by John Bunyan, published in 1678-84, that describes the journey through life to the Celestial City of a man called Christian. On his way through the Slough of Despond, the House Beautiful, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, and other landmarks, he meets a number of allegorical figures. MORE

A romantic tragedy by Shakespeare. It was published in quarto in a corrupt form in 1597, and in a better edition in 1599. MORE

From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
A late-14th-century verse romance preserved in the same manuscript as Pearl, patience and Cleanness. Although these are explicitly religious and Sir Gawain is not, all four are linked by similarities of dialect (west Midlands), diction and style. MORE

From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
Edmund Spenser's longest, most complex and greatest poem. The first three books appeared in 1590 with the author's epistle to his friend Sir Walter raleigh, offering hints for interpretation of the work and indicating a plan of 12 books in all. MORE

From The Bloomsbury Dictionary of English Literature
Verses by Omar Khayyam, a Persian scholar and poet who died in 1123. MORE

From The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature
The Three Ravens and The Twa Corbies are ballad analogues that offer a remarkably concise comparison between the visions of the medieval aristocracy and the common people. MORE

Italian poet, b. Florence. Dante was the author of the Divine Comedy, one of the greatest of literary classics. MORE

William Blake, born in London where he spent all but three years of his life, was both poet and visionary artist. Despite having a number of artist friends, he was one of the first unrecognized geniuses of the Romantic age. MORE

English poet. The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories told by a group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, reveals his knowledge of human nature and his stylistic variety, from the sophisticated and subtly humorous to the simple and bawdy. MORE

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
English poet and divine. He is considered the greatest of the metaphysical poets. MORE

From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
In English his name means ‘David son of William’. He was born in the parish of Llanbadarn Fawr, just outside Aberystwyth. Few details of his life are known but his family certainly belonged to the influential class of Welsh landed gentry known as uchelwyr. MORE

Persian poet and mathematician, b. Nishapur. He was called Khayyam [tentmaker] probably because of his father's occupation. The details of his life are mostly conjectural, but he was well educated and became celebrated as the outstanding mathematician of his time. MORE

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Putative author of Piers Plowman. He was born probably at Ledbury near the Welsh marshes and may have gone to school at Great Malvern Priory. Although he took minor orders he never became a priest. MORE

English poet and prose writer. His epic Paradise Lost (1667) is one of the landmarks of English literature. MORE

From The Columbia EncyclopediaChinese poet. He was also called Su Shih. Born in present-day Sichuan prov., he was one of a literary family. Su occupied many official posts, rising to president of the board of rites (which regulated imperial ceremonies and worship). MORE

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Great Islamic Persian sage and poet mystic, b. in Balkh. His father, a scholar, was invited by the Seljuk sultan of Rum to settle in Iconium (now Konya), Turkey. MORE

English dramatist and poet, b. Stratford-on-Avon. He is widely considered the greatest playwright who ever lived. MORE

Lady Murasaki, as she is usually called in English, authored what is arguably the world's first novel, Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji), Murasaki Shikibu nikki (The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu), and a set of poetic memoirs (kashu). Like other aristocratic women of her time, she is known by a sobriquet. MORE

English poet. His major work is the allegorical epic The Faerie Queene, of which six books survive (three published in 1590 and three in 1596). Other books include The Shepheard's Calendar (1579), Astrophel (1586), the love sonnets Amoretti, and the marriage poem Epithalamion (1595). MORE

From The Companion to British History
Statesman, historian and poet, was Law Speaker of the Icelandic Althing (Parliament) from 1215 to 1218 and again from 1222 to 1231. MORE