William Dunbar, a Scottish poet who lived in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, left a literary legacy consisting of eighty-three lyrics. At different periods, these poems have been praised or ignored. Sir Walter Scott praised them in the early nineteenth century as did Professor James Paterson later in the same century. Modern scholars and critics have largely rejected this encomium. Denton Fox has called the poems stale and unevocative. But one critic, James Kinsley, editor of the most recent volume of the poems, declares his belief that Dunbar was the greatest English, not just Scottish, poet between Chaucer and Spenser. / In this dissertation I demonstrate that Dunbar's place as one of the preeminent poets between Chaucer and Spenser rests on the interaction of religion and rhetoric, coming together in the areas of invention, purpose, audience, and style. To support this thesis, I devote the first chapter to rhetoric as it relates to Dunbar's audiences, one real and immediate, one contrived and literary. The second chapter shows how the poet's overall topos was religion, with varied rays from its center making up his themes. In the third chapter I deal with the coalescence of rhetoric and religion in another major component of communication, style. And in the fourth and final chapter I offer evidence that the lyrics are, in fact, sermons in verse. Some of them are devotions, some are didactic homelies, while others, the most original, are parodies of traditional exegeses. / Dunbar addressed his poems to King James IV of Scotland, to Queen Margaret, to members of the royal court, to the merchants and workers of Edinburgh, to other poets, and to himself. For most of these lyrics his audience is a real and immediate one, but for some poems addressed to the last two groups it is literary. / The poet's style is marked by versatility and polished craftsmanship, with diction varying from the aureate to the colloquial and often bawdy. For each lyric prosody and stanzaic form varies as if the poet deliberately chose the best vehicle to carry the intended meaning. / Perhaps because the Franciscans discouraged the preservation of sermons, Dunbar left no prose exegeses. But many of the lyrics are sermons revealing his knowledge of theology and his personal commitment to the Lord. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-04, Section: A, page: 1125. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_75314 |
| Contributors | WOLINSKI, MABEL JONES., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 130 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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