Forms and Celestial Motion in Chaucer's "Complaint of Mars."

Description: Reads the relations between the planetary event and perspectives on it in Mars as analogous to those between form and interpretation in new formalist literary analysis. In Mars the celestial motion of the geocentric universe is subject to the "standards of individual perception,” enabling “a metacommentary on the [literary] forms that emerge" during close reading and generating awareness of the "temporary impressions that poetry produces as it is read and the larger patterns that actually govern its structure." Includes comments on Troilus's watching the moon in TC, V.648–51.