Lyrics of the Middle Ages

the long version

From the Introduction: The literature of the Middle Ages has been unduly neglected in this century, especially in the lyric phase, by both the teacher and the reader. For the reader, let it be said that he has had scant opportunity to do otherwise than neglect, unless he sought out old books in a library. New books have offered him little more than the scattered introductory sections in anthologies of translation, and the scholarly collections of early English poetry. Two or three recent anthologies of medieval writing give so little lyric poetry that it seems to have been considered rather a necessary blemish among the pages of prose than a brilliant manifestation of the spirit of the times. This collection is intended to fill the gap in a modest way, but is not a remedy for academic deficiencies I may touch upon later. It is, I believe, the first anthology to present only medieval poetry in translation in a broader than national scope. As for those teachers whom I charge at the outset, they tend, in the main, to stress medieval historical events, social and economic revolutions, and religious thought. When they turn to literature at all, it is usually to the long narrative poems, romances and epics. The student has, it is true, in English courses, a smattering of medieval creative writing before Chaucer tossed at him-The Shepherd's Play or Everyman, fragments from Morte Arthur or Gawaine and the Green Knight, Beowulf, and a handful of lyrics. The effect of this isolation from the main stream of European literature, in lyric poetry particularly, is to instill in the student the notion that for a thousand years almost nothing was written that might interest him. It is, then, easy for him to accept the term, "Dark Ages", and seek brighter reading matter elsewhere.-- page xv.