ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explains three examples of thinking in poetry that are all taken from late-medieval England. He considers Pearl, the unjustly neglected St Erkenwald, and an episode from William Langland’s Piers Plowman. For according to Aristotle the true poet deals only in imitation or mimesis, not in the exposition of ‘medicine or physical philosophy’, as in the writings of Empedocles. In the Pearl poet’s vision, as in Dante’s Paradiso, the blessed souls form a hierarchy, with the Virgin Mary in supreme position as empress. In the last part of Pearl, the poet turns from argument, ‘provando e riprovando’, to direct vision. The story of Trajan was recorded by clerks, as the poet twice notices; but, in his radical version, ‘al the clergie under Crist’ was powerless to snatch the pagan emperor out of hell.
