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Nolan's focus is on Book I of Vox Clamantis, first deemed Visio by Maria Wickert, who showed that it was composed later than six Books following, which were subsequently attached. Her argument is wide-ranging one, and difficult to summarize. At its core is idea that Rising of 1381 acted on Gower as kind of personal and aesthetic crucible, out of which he came to forge poetics altogether new and different from that which governs Mirour de l'Omme and last six Books of VC. This early poetic Nolan terms a account of relation between self and society, individual and community, dramatized in part by dialogue between narrator and Wisdom (p. 113), and she says it is present alongside parallel Ovidan account in Visio. By Boethian Nolan apparently has in mind Gower's sense of poet as guardian of established social and cosmic orders--the Gower, in other words, of comun profit who speaks from disembodied space and time. At one edge, this Boethian voice is (or seems to be) vox clamantis in deserto persona most commonly recognized by traditional Gowerian scholarship. Nolan, however, offers several dualities by way of illustrating her point.Boethian/Ovidian is just one; she also makes use of the poetics of attachment/detachment and the poetics of disclosure and (passim., but see especially p. 132), all of which seem to translate into Gower's recognition that best poetry must involve heart as well as head. She like others sees in Visio Ovidian cento and, by much thoughtful and pointed analysis of selected passages shows that, for majority of Gower's readers as for Gower himself, those centonic excerpts would have conjured up their original Ovidian context, and hence Ovid's passionate embrace of things living. effect of this is to puncture surface of poem, producing openings in text through which readers can access Ovid's verse in all of its complexity and multivalence (p. 115). Ovid thereafter comes to represent involvement of poet's emotions with his art, healing value of which (both for poet and for society at large) in Nolan's view Gower is forced to discover by violence of 1381. She keys on emergence of Arion at end of Visio, treating it as bridge to larger figure in CA, and also most persuasively as evidence of Gower's developing sense of himself as man and poet, whose emotions have significance, not only to him, but also as means of uniting all living things in common purpose and harmony, i.e., Arion's music. Gower comes to see this as way not merely to heal society, but to improve it. In Visio, Nolan finds him working this out--and recognizing his kinship as poet even with peasants at their most bestial: The Rising, too, is kind of disclosure; it is form of resistence to closure embodied in social hierarchy and repression. It revealed possibilities; it exposed injustices; it opened closed doors and disclosed emblems of power within. Gower's poetics of disclosure is called into being by demands of peasants for self-determination; his narrator is created by crisis rebels brought about. Their demands were shocking--not least, Gower suggests, because self-determination was obsession of clerks and poets (p. 133). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society JGN 30.2]
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