The article examines the crucial social conditions, political crises, and royal statutes that underlie verse found in London, British Library MS Harley 2253. Special attention is given to seven ...political poems: three composed under Henry III around the Montfortian 1260s (the English Song of Lewes, the French Lament for Simon de Montfort, and the Latin All the World's a Chess Board); two composed in the 1330s that, like Chess Board, oppose royal taxation (the French-Latin Against the King's Taxes and the English Song of the Husbandman); a poem of outlaw protest (the French Trailbaston); and a comic dialogue (the French Jongleur of Ely and the King of England). These poems participated in the sociopolitical history of England—local, regional, and national—from 1300 to 1350. Three appendices present the political verse copied by the Harley Scribe into Harley 2253 and Royal 12. C. xii, the relationship of Husbandman to contemporary statutes, and a ribald analogue to Jongleur.
Four fabliaux from London, contained in the British Library MS Harley 2253 and translated into English verse, are presented. The anthology offers a unison composed of contraries: but unlike Pandarus, ...though much like the Chaucerian narrator at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, or the Parson at the end of the Canterbury Tales, the compiler of Harley 2253 tries to overcome the tragedies and follies within its implicit narrative, and direct his readers to the celestial Jerusalem.
The variety of contemporary American poetry leaves many readers overwhelmed. Critic, scholar, and poet Stephanie Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, ...she presents 60 poems, each with an original essay explaining how the poem works, why it matters, and how it speaks to other parts of art and culture.
Revard shows the transforming power of Simon Ortiz's work that touches people's lives, deeply and generationally turning to the origins of life in the formation and birth of a child. He always thinks ...of Ortiz's "Forming Child" poems, at a time when one of the poet's children was forming in the mother's womb.
What Chaucer did with fabliaux in the Canterbury Tales is unmatchable, yet there are fabliaux of a quality comparable to his, composed or redacted not on the continent but in England, and almost ...within his lifetime, which he may well have known.
Revard remarks that Mark Twain's disdain for Native Americans--as exemplified primarily in his Injun Joe character from "Tom Sawyer"--has been overlooked by scholars. Revard sets out to understand ...why.
Revard Carter. A Goliard's Feast and the Metanarrative of Harley 2253. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 83, fasc. 3, 2005. Langues et littératures modernes - Moderne taal en ...litterkunde. pp. 841-867.
