ed types: the distant lover who refuses mercy, the supplicant who insists on his loyalty, the benevolent or silent empowered figure. Such lyric is generated not via a mimesis of the poet’s personal life and experiences, but rather a conscious variation on established, literary commonplaces. Criseyde’s question is an attempt to assign this general song a peculiar identity. Despite its abstract and thoroughly conventional treatment of the subject of love and its rewards, the song carries for Criseyde the potential to embody an actual scenario, to be unmediated by the literary tradition and truly representative of individual experience. Criseyde, by seeking the name of the author, not only wishes to determine that author’s intentio, but also to associate the described experiences with a unique individual, thereby assigning the lyric a sort of mimetic potential: the ability, in other words, to reflect ontological truth and not just literary custom. Criseyde wishes to affix to the song specific details, to withdraw it from the anonymous realm of a purely literary lyric and ground it in everyday experience. In a sense, what Criseyde seeks with her question is a method of demonstrating that the song can indeed have a generating impulse in a single individual. Once she discovers that the author’s station is equivalent to her own, Criseyde immediately begins to apply the song to her own specific situation, to occupy fully the speaking position and to identify the generalized lyric song—devoid of specific details—as a description of her own private life. Even Troilus’ songs, born from his peculiar emotional struggles, lack the individual character of modern lyric. Although we might hear

Piers plowman and the invention of the lyric

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Piers Plowman and the Invention of the Lyric in the Middle Ages

TN a previous paper 1 I suggested that two important qualities of thought are commonly overlooked, namely: (i) its historical character, (ii) its individual distinctiveness. In the present paper I propose to consider in more detail the second of these qualities. In the psychological study of thought we are not concerned with the logical, moral or social quality of the final product of thinking, but primarily with its mode of development and operation. It is not the business of the psychologist to classify the \" ripe apples \" of thought. Nor does historical or causal analysis of the end-product of thought provide any criterion of its value. We may enquire, as Piaget 2 has done, whether there are laws governing the changing structures of thought through different stages from birth to maturity, or we may study particular ideas or systems of ideas and trace their origin and manner of growth. It is this second problem which I wish here to discuss. Since there can be no thoughts without a thinker, thinking must be taken to mean some person-thinking. The form of one's thought, the sort of explanation or suggestion that occurs to a person's mind, the specific hypothesis he entertains or feels moved to explore, and the amount of effort he exerts, must, we may assume, be characteristic of him as an individual with a distinctive life history. For the psychologist, everything a person says or does must be seen as an item in a context, the context of personal history and present situation.3 In seeking

John Cohen

Papers

Individuality of thought