After Word Lydgate’s Refrain: The Open When

Abstract

It has taken almost forty years, but Lydgate is finally recovering from Pearsall.¹ The chapters in this book testify not to a surmounting of Pearsall’s critique, but to an embrace of the very pathological traits in Lydgate’s writing that Pearsall identified wittily and eloquently. These traits, of course, are only pathological when considered against the force of the powerful and only partly suppressed adoption of the normativity of a high modernist economy of narrative (what Pearsall calls a “fastidious notion of poetry” embodied in a “slim volume of verse”). ² For readers accustomed to the digressions and immensities of David Foster Wallace’s and Mark Danielewski’s work, it must be possible to resist Pearsall’s devotion to proportion and circumspect development of character. Lydgate’s verse seems to extend infinitely, and therefore it seems to invite us to critique it for its failure to have shortcomings, its apparent failure to acknowledge a linguistic economy apart from its infinite capital.