"'A poem ends / when the sound of it is finished': Reading John Gower with Elizabeth Willis," a Lecture by Eric Weiskott

According to most prevalent categories of literary analysis, John Gower and Elizabeth Willis are a mismatched pair. English and American; fourteenth century and twenty-first; reactionary and radical; plain and avant-garde; trilingual and monolingual; monumentalizing and particularizing; the pursuit of harmony and the pursuit of extremity; social satire and lyric. Without denying these differences, this paper explores one way in which Willis, a contemporary poet born in Bahrain in 1961 and raised in Wisconsin, makes an effective conversation partner for Gower, ‘frenemy’ of Geoffrey Chaucer in fourteenth-century London. Both poets build their lines and stanzas out of sound.

Eric Weiskott is Professor of English at Boston College. He is the author most recently of the scholarly monograph Unheard Melodies: Apophatic Poetics and Literary Reading (Fordham University Press, forthcoming) and the poetry book Cycle of Dreams (punctum books, 2024). Both books juxtapose fourteenth- and twenty-first-century poetries. As a textual editor, Eric produced critical editions of three Middle English dream visions: the A version of William Langland’s Piers Plowman (University of Exeter Press, 2025), Geoffrey Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess (for the forthcoming Cambridge Chaucer project), and Death and Life (in preparation for Medieval Institute Publications).

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