James I. Wimsatt – författare

James I. Wimsatt edits Guillaume de Machaut's important Dit de la fleur de lis et de la Marguerite; he identifies an acrostic connecting the earlier Dit de la Marguerite and Complainte VI with the crusader Pierre of Cyprus; and he established a probable historical framework for the three poems.

Guillaume de Machaut is the most important poet and composer of late medieval France. His unique and inventive output is the subject of this edition of Machaut's poetry. Le Jugement Du Roy De Behaigne and Remede De Fortune was published in collaboration with the Chaucer Library. These two works are among de Machaut’s most important artistically in terms of their formal innovations and their influence on contemporaries, notably Geoffrey Chaucer, and the associated Lay de plour, presented here with its music. This volume includes the French originals and facing English translations.

Guillaume de Machaut is the most important poet and composer of late medieval France. His unique and inventive output is the subject of this edition of Machaut's poetry. Le Jugement Du Roy De Behaigne and Remede De Fortune was published in collaboration with the Chaucer Library. These two works are among de Machaut’s most important artistically in terms of their formal innovations and their influence on contemporaries, notably Geoffrey Chaucer, and the associated Lay de plour, presented here with its music. This volume includes the French originals and facing English translations.

Translation of fifteen lyrics marked "Ch" found in University of Pennsylvania MS French 15, along with a detailed inventory of the contents and a study of English and Chaucerian connections.When Chaucer began his service inthe English courts in the late 1350s, the French lyric in the formes fixes of ballade, rondeau, virelay, and chant royal was the poetry of the court. Chaucer no doubt composed such poetry. Among extant anthologies of lyricsin the fixed forms from that time, University of Pennsylvania MS French 15, comprising 310 poems of which about half are anonymous, seems the most likely to contain works written by Chaucer. To add to the likelihood, fifteen of the best anonymous poems - ten ballades, four chants royaux, and a rondeau - have the intriguing initials "Ch" entered just beneath the rubrics. Besides editions and translations of the fifteen lyrics, Chaucer and the Poems of "Ch" provides a record of the numerous filiations of the Pennsylvania MS collection with Chaucer and England. This record includes text of a fascinating exchange of poems between Chaucer's early contemporaries, Philippe de Vitry and Jean de la Mote, the text of Granson's Cinq Balades Ensievans in the closest version extant to Chaucer's Complaint of Venus, and an analysis of the contents of the MS as they relate to Chaucer. Chaucerand the Poems of "Ch" concludes with a detailed inventory of this little-studied MS with particular note of Chaucerian aspects of it.

In this provocative and highly acclaimed study, a distinguished Chaucerian provides the first comprehensive analysis of the contemporary French influence on Chaucer. Bringing to the subject his expertise in both Chaucer and fourteenth-century French literature, James I. Wimsatt reveals the range and complexity of Chaucer's literary and personal relations with the important but neglected French poets of the fourteenth century. He demonstrates how the body of Middle French verse can open new avenues into the fundamental nature of Chaucer's poetry.Chaucer and His French Contemporaries synthesizes Winsatt's work on Chaucer's French connections over the past twenty-five years, particularly his studies and editions of Machaut. At the same time, much is new: an analysis of the meaning of 'natural music' in the light of Deschamps' and Machaut's critical observations, a presentation of Jean de le Mote as a seminal influence in young Chaucer's poetic environment, a demonstration of the parallels and divergences of Froissart's and Chaucer's literary careers, an exposition of Granson's broad borrowings from his English friend, and a fresh look at the puys, the pourgeois poetic societies that flourished in northwest France and London.

Although virtually unknown in his lifetime, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is counted today among the great nineteenth-century poets. His poetry was collected and published posthumously by his friend Robert Bridges in 1917, and subsequently Hopkins's reputation flowered, though more as a modern writer than as Victorian, and very little as a poetic theorist. Yet the body of Hopkins's critical writing reveals sharp insight into the subject of poetics, and presents an innovative theory that locates primary poetic meaning in 'figures of speech sound.' These 'figures of speech sound' provide the focus for James I. Wimsatt's erudite and original study. Drawing from Hopkins's diaries, letters, student essays, and correspondence with poet-friends, Wimsatt illuminates Hopkins's theory that the sound of poetic language carries an emotional, not merely logical and grammatical, meaning. Wimsatt concentrates his study on Hopkins's writings about 'sprung rhythm,' 'lettering,' and 'inscape,' - his coinages - and makes abundant reference to Hopkins's verse, showing how it exemplifies his language theory. A well-researched and highly detailed book, Hopkins's Poetics of Speech Sound asserts major significance for a relatively neglected aspect of this important poet's writings.