SOURCE: Marlin, John. “‘Arestyus is Noucht bot Gude Vertewe’: The Perplexing Moralitas to Henryson's Orpheus and Erudices.” Fifteenth-Century Studies 25 (2000): 137-53.

In the following essay, Marlin discusses the Henryson's intent in Orpheus and Erudices to both elicit an affective response from his reader and to supply a moral exegesis of the poem.

Relations between affect and intellect are often uneasy in the act of reading poetry. This tension is inherent in the very act of exegesis, which reorders aesthetic constructs into analytic categories, often by bringing a poem into a relationship with a complex of ideas external to it. Sometimes, however, this tension is also inherent within a literary work itself. As Wesley Trimpi has argued, a poem, when seeking an affective response, will often be at odds with its attempt to engage the intellect if one aim is pursued at the expense of the other, a problem he...