The English Alliterative Tradition

Author / Editor
Cable, Thomas.

Title
The English Alliterative Tradition

Published
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

Physical Description
x, 191 pp.

Description
Disputes the traditional view that the English alliterative poetical tradition was consistent from the seventh through the fifteenth centuries and proposes profound differences between Old English meter, early Middle English meter, and Alliterative Revival meter, with a continuing discussion of the evolution of English meters.
Section 5.3, "The Decasyllabic Meter of Chaucer and Gascoigne," proposes two distinct metrical traditions in the decasyllabic line, the "alternating" pattern of Chaucer and the "foot" pattern of Shakespeare and Sidney.

Chaucer Subjects
Style and Versification.