ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book aims to capture as much as possible of what the poems bring into the overall scheme of meaning without leaving anything of significance out of the general picture that emerges in the process. In Christian, Augustinian reformulation, pervasive Neoplatonism is the conceptual foundation of the Cotton Nero poems. The reality that each human being faces in the world as seen by the Pearl-Poet is characterized by a fundamental rift at its deepest core, a split that renders it essentially twofold and seems impossible to bridge. When Blanch and Wasserman say that many scholars prefer to deal with individual poems because they fear the potential discovery of separate authorship and its repercussions for their claims, they may capture the spirit of the critical community.
