Prophet Margins

Book excerpt: While poets have traditionally inhabited cultural margins, prophets have brought poetic language to the center of cultural debate, not foretelling the future so much as diagnosing the present. This exciting collection of nine essays examines the range of social and political implications that inflects poetic discourse, from the Old English and Latin texts of the Anglo-Saxon world to the Scotland and England of the Renaissance. Whether saints' lives, Germanic heroic epics, chronicles, or satiric poems, the works discussed in this book retain their verbal power, if not their political influence, into our own time.