Poetry in Credo: Medieval & Renaissance Poetry

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
At the round earth's imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels; and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go.

From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
A collection of 228 troubadour songs in Latin and German, discovered in 1803 by Freiherr Christoph von Arentin in the monastery of Benedikt Beuren, about 60 miles south of Munich. Dating from the early 13th century, they are a mixture of moral-satirical texts, love lyrics (some of them very sexually explicit) and drinking songs.

From Brewer's Curious Titles
An epic poem by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), who completed it in 1321, just before his death. The original title was simply Commedia (Italian, ‘ play’), and it was not until after the 16th century that it became known as the Divina Commedia. There are three parts, Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio and Paradiso.

A tragedy by William Shakespeare, first performed c. 1601. A bad, perhaps pirated, Quarto (Q1) was published in 1603. Modern editors use a second Quarto (Q2), published in 1604, and the text in the First Folio of 1623.

From Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature
One of the great religious poems in the English language, Piers Plowman is a text from the late 14th century alliterative revival in England's West Midlands. There are three separate versions of Piers Plowman (A, B, and C-texts), and the general scholarly consensus is that Langland is the author of all three. The poem presents 10 separate dreams (sometimes dreams within dreams), separated by brief waking passages.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Allegory by John Bunyan, published in 1678-84, that describes the journey through life to the Celestial City of a man called Christian. On his way through the Slough of Despond, the House Beautiful, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, and other landmarks, he meets a number of allegorical figures.

A romantic tragedy by Shakespeare. It was published in quarto in a corrupt form in 1597, and in a better edition in 1599.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Edward Fitzgerald's translations of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám made it familiar to English readers. Rubáiyát is a verse form consisting of four half-lines complete in themselves, with the rhyme scheme aaba. This form has traditionally been used by Persian, Arabic, and Turkish poets.

Italian poet, b. Florence. Dante was the author of the Divine Comedy, one of the greatest of literary classics.

William Blake, born in London where he spent all but three years of his life, was both poet and visionary artist. Despite having a number of artist friends, he was one of the first unrecognized geniuses of the Romantic age.

English poet, noted for his narrative skill, humour, and insight. The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories told by a group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, reveals his knowledge of human nature and his stylistic variety, from the sophisticated and subtly humorous to the simple and bawdy. Although frequently imitated, Chaucer's blend of humour, realism, philosophical depth, poetic virtuosity, and masterful control of dialogue and character was never matched. Chaucer made a crucial contribution to English literature in using English at a time when much court poetry was still written in Anglo-Norman or Latin. His confidence in the English language encouraged his followers and imitators also to write in English and speeded the transition from French as the language of literature.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
English poet and divine. He is considered the greatest of the metaphysical poets.

Persian poet and mathematician. As astronomer to Sultan Malikshah, he was one of a group that undertook to reform the calendar. He was called Khayyam [tentmaker] probably because of his father's occupation. The details of his life are mostly conjectural, but he was well educated and became celebrated as the outstanding mathematician of his time.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Putative author of Piers Plowman. He was born probably at Ledbury near the Welsh marshes and may have gone to school at Great Malvern Priory. Although he took minor orders he never became a priest.

English poet and prose writer. His epic Paradise Lost (1667) is one of the landmarks of English literature. His early works, notably L'Allegro and Il Penseroso (1632), the masque Comus (1634), and the elegy Lycidas (1637), show the influence of his Christian humanist education and his love of Italian Renaissance poetry.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Chinese poet. He was also called Su Shih. Born in present-day Sichuan prov., he was one of a literary family. Su occupied many official posts, rising to president of the board of rites (which regulated imperial ceremonies and worship).

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Great Islamic Persian sage and poet mystic, b. in Balkh. His father, a scholar, was invited by the Seljuk sultan of Rum to settle in Iconium (now Konya), Turkey.

English dramatist and poet, b. Stratford-on-Avon. He is widely considered the greatest playwright who ever lived.

English poet. His major work is the allegorical epic The Faerie Queene, of which six books survive (three published in 1590 and three in 1596). Other books include The Shepheard's Calendar (1579), Astrophel (1586), the love sonnets Amoretti, and the marriage poem Epithalamion (1595).

From Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature
Icelandic statesman, poet, historian and Iceland's best-known medieval writer. Snorri was ambitious, grew to be a powerful man of the time, and accumulated a great deal of wealth, becoming chieftain of several judicial districts. He was made lawspeaker of the Althing (the Icelandic parliament) in 1215–18 and again in 1222–31. Embroiled in the politics of his day, Snorri fell afoul of the Norwegian king, and was murdered in what was probably a political assassination in 1241.