Abstract
It’s probably a crime against storytelling to begin a book with a list but, generally speaking, so is literary criticism. So I’ll also acknowledge as a plain fact that the following list should be much longer and its simple ‘trajectory’ more indebted to the complex migratory dynamism of the “Lobster-Quadrille”1 than the honest eschatology of the arrow. And I evoke that particular dance not just because it was more or less free in form and encumbered by empiricism but also because it was an international sensation that attracted dancers of wildly divergent talents and temperaments. Its only stipulations were to “partner up with a lobster,” toss it “as far out to sea as you can,” “swim after it,” “turn a somersault in the sea,” and that, “we can do it without lobsters, you know.” It appears to have been the creation of “the Classical master … an old crab, he was,” who “taught Laughing and Grief.”2 How it survived from one generation to the next is a subtle question. “‘Would you like to see a little of it?’ said the Mock Turtle. ‘Very much, indeed,’ said Alice. ‘Which shall sing?’ … The two creatures, who had been jumping about like mad things all this time, sat down again very sadly and quietly … ‘Oh you sing,’ said the Gryphon. ‘I’ve forgotten the words.’”3 Which brings us to the list.
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Notes
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), 100.
D.W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 365.
Yasunari Takada, “Chaucer’s Use of Neoplatonic Traditions,” in Platonism and the English Imagination, ed. Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 45.
Augustine, Against the Academicians, in Against the Academicians and the Teacher, trans. Peter King (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Inc., 1995), 92.
Augustine, Of True Religion, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, trans. J.H.S. Burleigh (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006 [ad 390/391]), 229.
Augustine, Confessions (vii: ix), from The Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. E.M. Blaiklock (London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 2009), 171.
Samuel Daniels, “To the Lady Margaret, Countess of Cumberland,” in The London Book of English Verse, ed. Herbert Read and Bonamy Dobrée (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1949), 556.
G.K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1912), 248.
Plato, The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Dover Publications, 2000), 179.
Cicero, “The Dream of Scipio,” in On the Good Life, trans. Michael Grant (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1971), 354.
“The method of mythological interpretation that regards myths as traditional accounts of real incidents in human history”; “euhemerism,” Oxford English Dictionary: Volume III (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1933).
Lewis Spencer, An Introduction to Mythology (New York: Moffat and Company, 1921), 42.
Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 254.
Marc Pelen, Latin Poetic Irony in the Roman de la Rose, (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1987), viii.
“The soul is eternal and has seen the realm of Forms in heaven. But when the soul comes into the body, this knowledge needs to be recollected. Recollection is the process of learning, and because all the particulars are imperfect copies of the Forms, they can only act as reminders”; “recollection,” The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy, ed. Nicholas Bunnin and Jiyuan Yu (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).
For instance, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 686 (c. 1420) contains an alliterative scribal ending to the Cook’s Tale in which Perkyn receives his just desserts according to a straightforward moral matrix of sin and punishment, while twentieth-century critic J. Leslie Hotson attempts a one-to-one correspondence between the col fox and a fourteenth-century “Mr. Richard Colfox.” J. Leslie Hotson, Colfox vs. Chauntecleer, PMLA, Vol. 39, No. 4 (December 1924): 762–781. Both, over the long arc of human history, either deliberately anchor Chaucer’s poetry to the conditions of waking life for some larger metapoetic purpose or accidentally prove in practice the reverse alchemy the literalist hermeneutic.
J.O. Ward, “Rhetoric in the Faculty of Arts at the Universities of Paris and Oxford in the Middle Ages: A Summary of the Evidence,” Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi, Vol. 54 (1996): 160.
Cicero, De Senectute (v.13) from Cicero: De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, trans. William Armistead Falconer (London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 23.
Macrobius, Commentary of the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 81.
See for instance Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962) and Sheldon Sax, On Metaphor (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1980).
See G.R.F. Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas: A Study of Plato’s Phaedrus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Peter Travis, “Chaucer’s Heliotropes and the Poetics of Metaphor,” Speculum, Vol. 72, No. 2 (April 1997): 424.
R.J. Tarrant, “Aeneas and the Gates of Sleep,” Classical Philology, Vol. 1, No. 55 (January 1982): 51–55.
Peter Travis, Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010): 98.
Dante Alighieri, Paradiso (xxxiii: 124–126, 136–138), in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Geoffrey L. Bickersteth (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1972), 769.
Andrew Hussey, Paris: A Secret History (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2006), 12.
Ovid, Amores (I: XII), In The Heroïdes, Or Epistles of the Heroines. The Amours. Art of Love, Remedy of Love: And Minor Works of Ovid, trans. Henry T. Riley (London: Bell and Daldy, 1869), 295.
Derek Pearsall, “Towards a Poetics of Chaucerian Narrative,” in Drama, Narrative and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales, ed. Wendy Harding (Toulouse: Presses Universitaire du Mirail, 2003), 110.
T.F. Thielston Dyer, “The Cat and Its Folklore,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 252 (January- 1882), 604.
“Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite,” In Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, Lives of Homer, trans. Martin L. West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 177.
Homer, Iliad, trans. Samuel Butler (London: Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2009), 60.
Hunter H. Gardner, Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4.
Rory. B. Egan, “Cicada in Ancient Greece: Ventures in Classical Tettigology,” Cultural Entomology Digest, No. 3 (November 1994): 21.
Callimachus, Aetia (29–38), in Callimachus: Fragments, trans. Cedric Whitman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 9. Whitman adds the footnote, “The ‘voice’ of the cicada is frequently used in Greek poetry as a simile for sweet sounds. The cicala, according to Plato … is the favourite of the Muses, and in Alexandrian poetry poets are compared to, or called after it.”
Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, trans. Walter Hamilton (London: Penguin, 1973), 70.
T.S. Eliot, “Ash-Wednesday,” Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1952), 62.
G.M.A. Grube, Plato’s Thought (London: The Athelone Press, 1980), 188.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (665–660). Quoted in Mark P.O. Morford and Robert J. Lenardon, Classical Mythology, Sixth Edition (New York: Longman, 1999), 548.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 203.
John Updike, “Introduction,” in Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), ix.
Alistair Minnis, “The Trouble with Theology,” in Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 33.
Gudrun Richardson, “The Old Man in the Pardoner’s Tale: An Interpretive Study of His Identity and Meaning,” Neophilologus, Vol. 87 (2003): 324.
David Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), 26.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1907), 890.
Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. W.F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1958), 415–438.
L’envoy de Chaucer a Scogan (47). See also, Alfred Davis, “Chaucer’s Good Counsel to Scogan,” The Chaucer Review, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Spring 1969): 273.
Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” Collected Poems of Robert Frost (London: Jonathan Cape, 1943), 272.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), xviii.
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© 2015 Jameson S. Workman
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Workman, J.S. (2015). Poetry’s Old War. In: Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448644_1
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