Style
Libeaus Desconus is a late-fourteenth century Middle English poem of around 2200 lines (the exact number of lines varies amongst the six manuscripts). Like many Middle English romances (e.g. The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle and Emaré) the poem is divided into stanzas of tail-rhyme verse, a rhyming couplet followed by a tail-rhyme, repeated four times in each stanza in a scheme like aabccbddbeeb.
Writing principally in a dialect of southern England, possibly the SE Midlands, Thomas Chestre has been described as a 'hack writer' who had an acquaintance with a number of other Middle English romances and was able to borrow from them, often retaining the different dialects of the bits and pieces he incorporated into his own poetry. Libeaus Desconus was written for a more popular audience than the Old French romances on which it models itself.
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Famous quotes containing the word style:
“On the first days, like a piece of music that one will later be mad about, but that one does not yet distinguish, that which I was to love so much in [Bergotte’s] style was not yet clear to me. I could not put down the novel that I was reading, but I thought that I was only interested in the subject, as in the first moments of love when one goes every day to see a woman at some gathering, or some pastime, by the amusements to which one believes to be attracted.”
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“The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.”
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“Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the calibre of a bullet, teething beads.... One’s style holds one, thankfully, at bay from the enemies of it but not from the stupid crucifixions by those who must willfully misunderstand it.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)