WTF moments in English literature (1): John Lydgate

What a contemptible bore John Lydgate is. In the waning days of Ricardian England, he served as monk of Bury, an endowed monastery and a political nexus where bright young men secured their careers. For any medieval man unlucky enough not to be born noble, clerical work promised, in the very least, literacy, education, and influence. If a boy's family wished a wry future for him, and if they had a little money, they sent him off to be a monk. In the prestigious workshops of the Church, whose monasteries tutored the young to serve their ambitions, these boys made lifelong connections at court, whose resource and authority they tapped. One such boy was Lydgate, who soon eclipsed Geoffrey Chaucer as the most lauded poet of the age.

Never a man to settle for one word when one-hundred would do, Lydgate grew famous in his own time as an "aureate"--what we now would call a blabbermouth. He was prolix, magniloquent, fustian. . . you get my point. And audiences liked it. Kings liked it. These were the queer generations who continued to recite their poems in public, although in private they read them silently. Unlike the anonymous poets of the fourteenth century, who practiced the ancient habit of reading aloud, whether alone or with others--who understood literature to be basically oral and auditory, spoken and heard--Lydgate and his contemporaries instigated a wild and modern new concept of literature as personal experience. In the decades immediately prior to the introduction of the printing press, these men, for the first time in Western thought, viewed and promoted art as a commodity, something to own, to personalize, to possess.

Medieval readers cultivated tastes strikingly different from our own. They delighted in artifice, and in rhetorical excess, and so poets lavished embellishment upon them. Open up any old saint's life from the period and, no doubt, you'll find catalogues of birds, metals, illnesses, constellations, anything and everything. They cheered their writers to vomit information. Those poets who could write a political allegory about siege warfare while managing to count the number of sand grains in a lady's mirror, well, they were something special. Men who never shut up but never repeated themselves were like rock stars in the fifteenth century.

Lydgate's work was the most verbose, ornate, and rhetorical of the lot. His poems just never seem to end. And he wrote them on every possible topic. He has instructional poems to laundrywomen. That's what folks wanted in a poet: versatility. Any fool can rhapsodize on the fall of princes, but only a bard can teach patience to the king and proper soaping to the laundress. And if that versatility didn't take months to enjoy, I'd celebrate it too. But life has changed. We no longer have the time, or the desire, to sit silently reading about a thousand feathers on a duck's belly that the cobbler spied on the lake in the pine-frosted morning ad libitum. And that's the problem, isn't it? Largeness for its own sake. We don't take pleasure in it anymore. They did.

I've now scanned--not read, because, honestly, why would I--about ten thousand lines by this prolific twit. His verses are hideous. Metrically, they read like two barges colliding at sea. His lines are so bloated and queasy, they weigh on the page like little horizontal dead bodies. His tropes are linked handkerchiefs in a magician's pocket, just as obnoxious and just as obvious. He rhymes the first two words that come to mind, anybody's mind. Worst of all, he has no sense of humor. Nothing is more tedious than a long medieval poem with no jokes, which is why most medieval poems are full of them--ejaculation jokes, sodomy jokes, cuckoldry jokes, bestiality jokes. Do you realize that the Roman de la rose is a twenty-thousand-line wet dream?

Well, none of that lightness for Lydgate, and they loved him for it. Metrically inept. Rhetorically generous. Emotionally turgid. His poetry is word Ipecac. And they preferred it to Chaucer's. What the fuck?