GOWER, JOHN (d. 1408), English poet, died at an ad vanced age in 1408, so that he may be presumed to have been born about 133o. He belonged to a good Kentish family and owned the manors of Feltwell in Suffolk and Moulton in Norfolk. In a document of 1382 he is called an "Esquier de Kent," and he was certainly not in holy orders. That he was acquainted with Chaucer we know, first because Chaucer in leaving England for Italy in 1378 appointed Gower and another to represent him in his absence, secondly because Chaucer addressed his Troilus and Criseide to Gower and Strode (whom he addresses as "moral Gower" and "philosophical Strode") for criticism and correction, and thirdly because of the lines in the first edition of Gower's Confessio amantis, "And gret wel Chaucer whan ye mete," etc. There is no sufficient ground for the suggestion, based partly on the subsequent omission of these lines and partly on the humor ous reference of Chaucer to Gower's Confessio amantis in the introduction to the Man of Law's Tale, that the friendship was broken by a quarrel. From his Latin poem Vox clamantis we know that he was deeply and painfully interested in the peasants' rising of 1381; and by the alterations which the author made in successive revisions of this work we can trace a gradually in creasing sense of disappointment in the youthful king, whom he at first acquits of all responsibility for the state of the king dom on account of his tender age. That he became personally known to the king we learn from his own statement in the first edition of the Confessio amantis, where he says that he met the king upon the river, was invited to enter the royal barge, and in the conversation which followed received the suggestion which led him to write his principal English poem. At the same time we know, especially from the later revisions of the Confessio amantis, that he was an admirer of the king's brilliant cousin, Henry of Lancaster, afterwards Henry IV., whom he came eventually to regard as a possible saviour of society from the misgovernment of Richard II.
The first edition of the Confessio amantis is dated 139o, and this contains, at least in some copies, a secondary dedication to the then earl of Derby. The later form, in which Henry became the sole object of the dedication, is of the year 1393. Gower's political opinions are further embodied in the Cronica tripar tita.
In 1398 he was married to Agnes Groundolf, and from the special licence granted by the bishop of Winchester for the cele bration of this marriage in John Gower's private oratory we gather that he was then living in lodgings assigned to him within the priory of St. Mary Overy, and perhaps also that he was too infirm to be married in the parish church. It is probable that this was not his first marriage, for there are indications in his early French poem that he had a wife at the time when that was written. His will is dated Aug. 15, 1408, and his death took place very soon of ter this. He had been blind for some years before his death. A magnificent tomb with a recumbent effigy was erected over his grave in the chapel of St. John the Baptist within the church of the priory, now St. Saviour's, Southwark.
The effigy on Gower's tomb rests its head upon a pile of three folio volumes entitled Speculum meditantis, Vox clamantis and Confessio amantis. These are his three principal works. The first of these was long supposed to have perished, but a copy of it was discovered in the year 1895 under the title Mirour de l'omme. It is a French poem of about 30,000 lines in 12-line stan zas, and under the form of an allegory of the human soul describes the seven deadly sins and their opposing virtues.
Gower's next work was the Vox clamantis in Latin elegiac verse, in which the author takes occasion from the peasants' insurrection of 1381 to deal again with the faults of the various classes of society. In the earlier portion the insurrection itself is described in a rather vivid manner.
Gower's chief claim, however, to reputation as a poet rests upon his English work, the Confessio amantis, in which he dis plays in his native language a real gift as a story-teller. He is himself the lover of his poem, in spite of his advancing years, and he makes his confession to Genius, the priest of Venus, under the usual headings supplied by the seven deadly sins. These with their several branches are successively described, and the nature of them illustrated by tales drawn from very various sources and often extremely well told. The metre is the short couplet, and it is very smooth and regular. The great fault of the Confessio amantis is the extent of its digressions.
Gower also wrote in 1397 a short series of French ballades on the virtue of the married state (Traitie pour essampler les amantz maries), and of ter the accession of Henry IV. he produced the Cronica tripartita, a partisan account in Latin leonine hexameters of the events of the last 12 years of the reign of Richard II. About the same time he addressed an English poem in seven-line stanzas to Henry IV. (In Praise of Peace), and dedicated to the king a series of French ballades (Cinkante Balades), graceful and even poetical in expression. Several occasional Latin pieces also belong to the later years of his life.
On the whole Gower must be admitted to have had consider able literary powers ; and though not a man of genius, and by no means to be compared with Chaucer, yet he did good service in helping to establish the standard literary language, which at the end of the i4th century took the place of the Middle English dialects. The Confessio mantis was long regarded as a classic of the language, and Gower and Chaucer were often mentioned side by side as the fathers of English poetry.
A complete edition of Gower's works in four volumes, edited by G. C. Macaulay, was published in 1899-1902, the first volume con taining the French works, the second and third the English, and the fourth the Latin, with a biography. Before this the Confessio amantis had been published in the following editions: Caxton (1483) ; Berthelette (1532 and ; Chalmers, British Poets (181o) ; Rein hold Pauli (1857) ; H. Morley (1889, incomplete) . The two series of French ballades and the Praise of Peace were printed for the Roxburghe Club in 1818, and the Vox clamantis and Cronica tripartita were edited by H. O. Coxe for the Roxburghe Club in 1850. The Cronica tripartita, the Praise of Peace and some of the minor Latin poems were printed in Wright's Political Poems (Rolls series, 14) . The Praise of Peace appeared in the early folio editions of Chaucer, and has been edited also by Dr. Skeat in his Chaucerian and other Pieces. Reference may be made to H. J. Todd, Illustrations of the Lives and Writings of Gower and Chaucer (1810) ; the article (by Sir H. Nicolas) in the Retrospective Review for 1828; F. J. Child, "Memoirs on the Language of Chaucer and Gower," in Early English Pronunciation (1869 etc.) ; H. Morley, English Writers (1887 etc.), vol. iv.; B. ten Brink, History of Early English Literature (Eng. trans., 1883, etc.), vol. ii.; and W. J. Courthope, History of English Poetry (1895), vol. i. (G. C. M.)