SOURCE: Pearsall, Derek. “Lydgate as Innovator.” Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 53, no. 1 (March 1992): 5-22.

In the following essay, Pearsall argues that while Lydgate had a conventional attitude, he was a poetic innovator. Pearsall contends that Lydgate asserted the status of English as a competent literary language and invented new kinds of English poem while he was writing in response to commissions of various kinds.

To offer to write on Lydgate as an innovator may seem at first sight a rash undertaking, especially since it is a view of his poetic achievement apparently quite contrary to the views I myself have put forward in the past.¹ My argument has always been that Lydgate's importance and his claim on our attention is his representative and noninnovatory medievalness, and that there is little point in blaming him for not being what he had no ambition to be. Critics...