John Skelton and the early Renaissance: a biographical and critical study

Abstract

Skelton was an innovator of insufficiently recognised but nevertheless profound originality, one of the greatest anti-Romantics in English verse, a hard-headed practical poet and a poetical realist. His limitations are easy to discover, the result of deliberately chosen restrictions rather than poetical blind spots. There is no Romance in his poetry, nothing etherial or beyond the ordinary man's range of experience. But there is much in his verse that is profoundly serious and passionately thought out. The virtues of Skelton are those of sincerity - directness of approach and a continuous contact with reality:What though my stile be rude? / With trouthe it is ennewde. / Trouth ought to be rescude, / Trouthe should nat be subdude.A few years after his death the flood-gates of Romance were thrown open, and no one can blame late Tudor or Jacobean poetry for ignoring such a resolute anti-Romantic. At the present day, however, the decay of Romanticisrn has brought a re-appreciation of the virtues of Skelton. He has much in his favour, powerful verse-satire,graceful lyric measures,originality of attach and incisive diction allied to a Shavian spirit of criticism and Babelaisian powers of wit and vocabulary. How many poets can offer such an original combination?