"Loquela gravis iuvat": Gower's O deus immense and the Place of Poetry, 1398–1400

Abstract:John Gower's medium-length Latin poem O deus immense, little thought of even by most Gowerians, brings his career into focus. O deus immense synthesizes strands of Gower's self-presentation pursued far more diffusely in his titanic trilogy Mirour de l'omme–Vox clamantis–Confessio Amantis. The place Gower clears for poetry in 1398, 1399, or 1400—the date of O deus immense is uncertain, a point addressed here at length—is characterized by its public, monitory, prophetic, and enigmatic dimensions. Focusing on the historically remote genre of political prophecy, this essay compares O deus immense with other Gowerian and non-Gowerian English political verse in English and Latin datable to 1398–1400, including Bede's Prophecy, an anonymous rhyming English poem of 1400 inedited until recently and therefore, like O deus immense, not factoring into previous critical assessments of the poetry of the Lancastrian coup. Attending to the complex relationship between poetics and politics at the turn of the fifteenth century in England, the essay positions O deus immense as pivotal in Gower's career and essential for an evaluation of what he contributed to the first generation of Lancastrian poetry. Gower's "most significant role" in the field of English political poetry, 1398–1400, was as its leading theorist and most skillful advocate, a role he plays most assiduously in O deus immense; but it is both a credit to his depth of ambition and an explanation of the often violent contortions of his late Latin style that Gower's arguments for a poetry of moral clarity, social urgency, and political muscle transcend the very ideological commitments that transparently motivate them.