ICC Book Club: Tales from the "Gawain Poet"

The "Gawain Poet" (also called the "Pearl Poet") wrote in the midst of a 14th-century revival of the old alliterative English verse. These three poems-"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "Patience," and "Pearl"-show him to be in the first rank as a rousing and humorous storyteller, a theologian and expounder of Scripture, and an artist. Join us to discover these masterpieces, and by the end see if you are not convinced, as is Dr. Esolen, that "Pearl" is the greatest poem in the English language.
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Recommended translation: The Gawain Poet: Complete Works, trans. Marie Boroff (Norton, 2011)
Resources
Reading Plan (ideally to be read in advance of each corresponding session):
Session 1, April 19: "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"
Session 2, May 17: "Patience"
Session 3, June 28: "Pearl"
(PDF) Study Questions for "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"
Instructor
Dr. Anthony Esolen is the author of dozens of books and over 1,000 articles in both scholarly and general interest journals. Known for his three-volume verse translation of the Modern Library edition of Dante's Divine Comedy, Professor Esolen has also written verse translations of Tasso's epic poem, Jerusalem Delivered, and of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things. His own book-length sacred poem, The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord, is a series of 100 lyric poems and dramatic monologues interspersed with two dozen of his own beautifully written hymns. He is currently a professor of humanities and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College, and he is a frequent speaker at colleges and at church and civic institutions. For more from Dr. Esolen, please visit his online magazine, Word & Song, at www.AnthonyEsolen.com.
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