Reneisance

Many attempts have been made by writers to secure immortality in their work, to express it in the most general terms and most of all to find an universal formula for it. The literary reception is recognized to be complex by both Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Waller. Both authours share the complexity of hope to achive enduring fame and the obstacles one must face as an authour in the vastly changing world. Both poems “To His Scribe Adam” by Chaucer and “Of English Verse” by Waller exhibits characteristics that would suggest their shared ambition towards future literary reception that aimg at artistic immortality. The obstacles can be recognized as attempts for textual correctness, preservation of the work, and strong literary identity.

Textual correctness is esentiall for maintaining the quality of the orginal text. Well copied or translated text idealy should spell out authour’s orginal attempts of meaning and craftmenship in words. Both the risks of a constantly developing language coupled with danger of replicating words pose a treat to the vadility of the prominance and positive literary reception in the future. The Edmund Waller’s poem “Of English Verse” stress the correctness in writing on several occasions. This is most noticable in the second stanza (lines 4-7) where Wallers feared the changing language and seen it as as a treat to correctess of literary works. The language played a very important role in preserving the authours craftmenship and meaning which ultimatly lead to immortality in the eyes of the readers. Both Chaucer and Wallace recognize the danger of changing language, either by hand or by changing dialect. Like Wallace, Chaucer recognized the dependance on stability of language for his immortalit...

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...quently is preceived with means of imagination which is a subjective experience. The divergence of opinion regarding what is there to remember or respect is surley the principal caused with diversity of opinion. Nevertheless those two authours achieved their glory partly with those two poems. In essence the poems were far from a showcase feelings, rather used as a means to pass on a message which in both cases the message was clear, to be known forever. As Waller so beutifully described buildings wear off due to their construction, simmilarly literary works need to have a building blocks that are strong. The building blocks of poetry and literature of that time needed to be correctness, preservation and strong literary indentity as everything else seemed to vanish with time. As Edmund Wallace noticed, poets seek stability of immortal marble rather than fagile sand.