Pleasurable Forms and Forms of Pleasure in the Pages of the Pearl – manuscript

Pleasurable Forms and Forms of Pleasure in the Pages of the Pearl – manuscript

Paper given by Arthur Bahr

Given at the 5th Canada Chaucer Seminar, held at the University of Toronto, on April 27, 2013

Arthur Bahr’s (MIT) paper given at the Canada’s Chaucer Seminar at the University of Toronto, April 27th, 2013. He discussed the poem, Pearl, jokingly termed, ‘a formalists wet dream’, and focused on its implied relationship between pleasure and form and how it explored the relationship between desire and fruitfulness. Pearl is followed by the poem Cleanness. Bahr also contrasted and compared the two poems; Pearl draws from the New Testament, Cleanness, from the Old Testament and both poems demonstrate a relationship between literary and physical form.