Doggerel Verse and Critical Recoil

Abstract

Early 20th-century critics rediscovered a literary concept called “doggerel” in Geoffrey Chaucer's Sir Thopas and in John Lydgate's mid-clash poetic line, using the term to help them categorize and periodize the shift in English literature from medieval to modern. A close look at this undertheorized term and its early iterations in Chaucer's poetry and Lydgate's verse makes clear that doggerel has been a crucial if underthought player not only in English metrical development, but also in the history of literary critique, as a versified counterstrategy that maps the contours of the unpoetic, challenges budding poetic norms, and works simultaneously to introduce and to upend traditional critical notions like the poet's ear.