John Walton’s Invention of the Iambic Pentameter

Abstract

ABSTRACT When Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, the decasyllable he invented in the late 1370s and raised to prominence in the 1380s and 1390s lay precariously in the hands of scribes and rivals. Of the poets to reform Chaucer’s meter in the first decade of the fifteenth century, John Walton devised the subtlest and most successful alternative to the inherited decasyllable, capitalizing on the full range of formal and grammatical ambiguities in Chaucer’s line and turning them from bugs into features, in an expanding program of new candidate meters. His revision of the decasyllable in De Consolatione Philosophiae (ca. 1410), a verse translation of Boethius and veiled satire on Chaucer’s Boece, uses the decasyllabic resource to fill several vacancies in the scramble for authority following Chaucer’s death.