Alliterative Revival

The Alliterative Revival is a term adopted by academics to refer to the resurgence of poetry using the alliterative verse form in Middle English between c. 1350 and 1500. Alliterative verse was the traditional versification of Old English poetry; the last known alliterative poem known before the revival was Layamon's Brut, which dates from around 1190.

Opinion is divided as to whether the reappearance of such poems represents a conscious revival of an old artistic tradition, or merely signifies that despite the tradition continuing in some form between 1200 and 1350, no poems have survived in written form. Major works of the Alliterative Revival include William Langland's Piers Plowman, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and the works of the Pearl Poet: Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Cleanness, and Patience.

The verse of the Alliterative Revival broadly adheres to the same pattern shown in Old English poetry; a four-stress line, with a rhythmic pause (or caesura) in the middle, in which three of the stresses alliterate, i.e. aa / ax. Amongst the features differentiating the Middle English alliterative style from its predecessor is that the lines are longer and looser in rhythm, and the medial pause is less strictly observed, or often absent entirely; hundreds of rhythmic variations seem to have been permitted. An example of this style is shown by a few lines from Wynnere and Wastoure:

A second type of verse combining rhymed stanzas, usually of thirteen or fourteen lines, with the basic four-stress line also appeared during the Revival. Here the alliteration may often follow the pattern aa / aa, ax / aa, or even aa / bb. It is still uncertain as to whether this tradition developed from the unrhymed alliterative template or from rhymed verse forms on which the traditional alliterative stave was superimposed. The surviving stanzaic alliterative poems are generally of northern English provenance; some, such as The Three Dead Kings, are of incredibly complex form.

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