This technical term provides a good example of the mis-named, the loosely-defined, the nameless and the only-belatedly-named in Middle English poetics. It’s a word sometimes flung about by my students when close-reading: any syntactical break (i.e. anywhere a line of poetry has a division between grammatical phrases or clauses, and especially if it’s near the middle of the line) gets called a caesura without too much thought. It’s one of those technical terms that gives you faux expertise: you can spot something easy (i.e. a syntactic break) and label it with a word which makes it seem as if you are analysing the metre. Joseph A Dane is usefully strict about how relevant the word is for Chaucer’s metre in this article (the answer is not very!).
Category Archives: arts of poetry
Janus Verse
The Power of Poetry
As part of my research, I’ve been looking at arts and defences of poetry in other languages and countries written during the late Middle Ages in order to get a sense of the bigger picture and to see what other cultures valued in their poetry. This week, here are some excerpts from two perhaps lesser-known celebrations of poetry which I have come across.