“…poet, may have been born in the 1330s or 1340s. Although the date of his death can be fixed, and his tomb still survives in Southwark Cathedral (formerly the priory of St Mary Overie), that of his birth is unknown. In a letter to Archbishop Arundel (c.1400) accompanying his Latin poem the Vox clamantis, Gower describes himself as ‘old’. How old he was is not revealed, but it has been assumed that this and similar references indicate that he was probably over sixty by the turn of the century.…

Gower died in 1408. His will was proved on 24 October. He left bequests to his wife, Agnes, who was one of his executors, to the prior, sub-prior, canons, and servants of St Mary Overie, and to the churches and hospitals of Southwark and the neighbourhood. Among the gifts to the priory was a large book, a martilogium ‘newly composed at my expense’, in which a memorial for him was to be recorded every day. He was buried in the chapel of St John the Baptist. Though his tomb and effigy is still to be seen, it has been moved twice since 1800, and the chapel has now disappeared. The painting and lettering on the tomb have been restored from earlier descriptions (by Thomas Berthelette, who printed the Confessio amantis in 1532, Leland, and Stow). Under his head was the likeness of three books–the Speculum meditantis, the Vox clamantis, and the Confessio amantis. A Latin inscription identified him as an esquire (armiger), a famous poet, and a benefactor. According to Stow he was represented with long curling auburn hair and a small forked beard. This seems likely to have been an idealized recollection of the poet in more youthful days (as perhaps are the pictures of him shooting the arrows of satire against the world that appear in two manuscripts of the Vox clamantis). An explicitly identified portrait (effigies Gower esquier) appears in the duke of Bedford’s psalter-hours (after 1414; BL, Add. MS 4213). It shows him as an elderly, almost bald man with white curling hair and a forked beard (Wright, 191); it may have been done from memory. It is one of a series of ten depictions of him in the initials of this Lancastrian manuscript, and some care seems to have been taken in the placing of them with psalms in a way that could recall the Vox clamantis. The figure is similar to the elderly, balding Amans sometimes depicted in manuscripts of the Confessio amantis, for instance in Bodl. Oxf., MS Bodley 902; in others, however (BL, MS Egerton 1991 provides a good example), the penitent is represented as an elegant and youthful figure. Such portraits are meant probably to be general rather than exact ‘likenesses’.

Gower’s poetic reputation has rested almost exclusively on the Confessio amantis. The number of manuscripts testify to its popularity. Uniquely, it seems, for a Middle English poem it was translated into Portuguese (probably in 1433–8) by Robert Payn, an Englishman in the household of Queen Philippa, the daughter of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and later a canon at Lisbon, and from that into Castilian prose (after 1428) by Juan de Cuenca. In the fifteenth century Gower’s name is linked with that of Chaucer, and later Lydgate, as one of the ‘masters’ of English poetry. He continued to be praised in the sixteenth century: in Pericles ‘ancient Gower’ is brought back from his ashes to introduce a play based on his story of Apollonius. But his fame did not last, and in spite of Thomas Warton’s full and generous account–‘If Chaucer had not existed, the compositions of John Gower … would alone have been sufficient to rescue the reigns of Edward III and Richard II from the imputation of barbarism’ (Warton, 311)–some nineteenth-century critics simply abused him–he ‘raised tediousness to the precision of science’, according to James Russell Lowell (My Study Windows, 1871). The Macaulay edition laid the foundation for serious study, and gradually modern criticism has done more justice to his poetic excellence. Chaucer’s epithet ‘moral’ was a very exact one. Gower had a coherent and serious view of the need for love and concord and peace, but he was not always solemn: in his Confessio amantis especially he brilliantly combined entertainment with doctrine–‘somwhat of lust, somewhat of lore’ (DNB).

“…poet and prior of Hatfield Regis, was born at Lidgate in Suffolk, ‘wher Bachus licour doth ful scarsli flete’ (The Fall of Princes, bk 8, l. 194), a few miles south-west of Bury St Edmunds where he was to spend most of his life, and where, presumably, there was a better supply of wine to refresh his ‘drie soule’.…

The date of his birth can be estimated from two references in his works: in the prologue to The Siege of Thebes (1420–22?) he says he is ‘nygh fyfty yere of age’ (Siege of Thebes, l. 93), and in The Fall of Princes (completed in 1438 or 1439) he speaks of his ‘mor than thre score yeeris’ (Fall of Princes, bk 8, l. 191)–and of his ‘pallid age’ and ‘tremblyng joyntes’.…

Lydgate’s reputation was at its height in the fifteenth century: he is praised again and again, and his name is regularly linked with those of Chaucer and Gower as one of the masters of English poetry. His fame continued through the sixteenth century, but gradually faded. In the eighteenth, interest was rekindled and he received a judicious account in Warton’s History of English Poetry and enthusiastic praise from Thomas Gray (Some Remarks on the Poems of John Lydgate, 1760). This very sympathetic and thoughtful treatment of his compassion for suffering and his skill in creating scenes of pathos has been eclipsed by the vituperative denunciation of Lydgate by Joseph Ritson in 1802 as ‘this voluminous, prosaick, and driveling monk’, whose works ‘by no means deserve the name of poetry’ (Ritson, 87ff.). Scholarly interest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Germany and England has produced edited texts of his works, and provided more material for understanding the literary culture that moulded him and which he helped to mould. This undoubtedly voluminous and often uneven poet will probably never recover his contemporary reputation, but at his best he can produce impressive moments and scenes, and is certainly a poet worthy of the name” (DNB).