While the class was reading the fourteenth-century Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as the first text in the WR 150 seminar on “The Matter of King Arthur,” Alicia Espinosa became fascinated with the power of alliterative verse to echo and instantiate the meaning of the words through sound. For the rest of the semester, Alicia delved deeper into this apparent anomaly of the Alliterative Revival that occurred in Middle English poetry long after the Old English poetic genre had been subsumed by the Anglo-Norman poetic verse forms of meter and rhyme. Alicia used her thorough research to effect in her final essay, “The Lost Tradition: Alliterative Poetry in Middle English,” an extraordinarily clear picture of the unique qualities of this more experimental yet still vigorous recasting of the precise alliterative poetic rules found in poems like Beowulf. Alliteration is peculiarly adaptable to Germanic languages, so that the loss of the serious poetic use of alliteration can be understood in Alicia’s essay as a cultural dispossession that the Pearl Poet and William Langland in his magnificent Piers Plowman tried to reclaim. What is most impressive about Alicia’s essay is the way she uses all the major scholars of alliterative poetry to explain how and why the Old English style faded, the Middle English revival occurred, and the French poetic forms used by the contemporaneous Geoffrey Chaucer ultimately triumphed. Alicia Espinosa’s essay is a classic example of the spark of interest in a topic catching fire and exciting the student to dig deeply and diligently for the treasure of knowledge to share with her colleagues.
— SARAH CAMPBELL
WR 150: The Matter of King Arthur Then and Now