Poems

de Gawin Douglas

"First published in 1967, this edition has been revised and updated by its editor, and includes substantial additional notes and bibliography. It contains Douglas's Palice of Honour, the major dream-vision poem he composed a decade before his Eneados translation. The Palice is a sprightly and learned poem, responsive both to Chaucerian and to Ovidian influences, but also inventively independent of them. Its yoking of poetics and the pursuit of virtue shows Douglas to be a significant early Renaissance writer. The volume also contains revised editions of two poems associated with Douglas, though unlikely to be his, the short poem Conscience and the lengthier and still neglected allegory of desire and self-government King Hart."--Pub. desc.