John Gower

John Gower was born in 1330. He was born into wealth, and he bought and sold estates up until 1377, when he took residence at St. Mary Overie Priory (a type of monastery).

Gower wrote three major works in three different languages. His first work was in french (still the language of the upper class at that time), Mirour de l’Omme (“Human Mirror”).

His second work Vox Clamantis (“The One Crying Out”) was written in Latin, a long poem in which John Gower responded to the peasant uprising in 1381 (i.e., “The Wat Tyler’s Rebellion” Or “The Great Uprising”). He wrote against the peasants, but also sympathized with Wycliffe and his disgust with corruption in the church.

His third book was written in English Confessio Amantis (“The Lover’s Confession”). This book was commissioned by Richard II during a chance meeting between the two.

Gower and Chaucer were friends, and Chaucer even dedicated his first (and only completed) work Troilus and Criseyde to “the moral Gower.” In contrasting the two poets, Michael Schmidt says:

Gower wrote poems specifically for recitation, while Chaucer, the first bourgeois poet, wrote poems to be read silently, in the privacy of one’s room, or between two or three people, preferably lovers. His best poems and fragments are too long and richly textured for an audience of monks or cortiers or common folk on feast days. The step from Gower to Chaucer is the step from pulpit or lectern into unbottoned private comfort.

Gower’s style is plainspoken. C.S. Lewis calls him “Our first formidable master of the plain style.” But he’s also been charged with long-windedness and moralizing. He’s not a radical. He writes poems that explains the already existing moral order, an order he sees as necessary to maintaining a stable world.