Artistic Design in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur

Abstract

Since the publication of J. Douglas Bruce's edition of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur in 1903, critical evaluation of the poem has ranged from perfunctory dismissal of the work as inferior (usually by those more interested in Malory or the Alliterative Morte Arthure) to carefully qualified praise: hardly ... an 'exquisitely beautiful work', yet I should say ...; Never once in its four thousand lines does it attain to brilliance, yet...'; Though marred by faults typical of the minstrel style, . . .I The consensus implies that while the romance displays occasional praiseworthy virtues, it remains on the whole a or uneven accomplishment. Yet even a cursory comparison of judgments reveals glaring disagreement over the poem's strengths and weaknesses. Whether the aspect under discussion be versification, narrative technique, characterization, or thematic appeal, faults in the eyes of one critic become merits in the opinion of another, and vice versa. Thus, while we are told on one hand that the poet's vocabulary is limited and stereotyped, that the difficulty of finding so many rimewords forced him to use meaningless or awkward line-fillers, we find on the other that the formulas economically advance the action rather than serve as mere line fillers.2 What strikes one critic as a choppy, episodic account impresses another as relatively tight and fast moving narrative.3 In characterization the poet is found wanting because we do not enter characters' minds, we know little of their motives, but he is praised because he understood that this was .. . above all a clash of personalities and conflict-

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