The Alliterative Conflict of Wit and Will: Toward a Reappraisal

The Conflict of Wit and Will is an alliterative psychomachia transmitted in fragments. A violent and moralizing allegorical narrative recorded on six strips of parchment used to repair a sixteenth-century printed book, the poem is a disturbing and delightful revenant. A unique blend of romance and social satire, Wit and Will attests to a literary groove or poetic microclimate from which nothing else has survived. This essay supplements the first and only edition, by Bruce Dickins (1937), with comments on the poem’s text, metre, date, style, and place in English literary history. The whole alliterative tradition looks different if one emphasizes the middle of the fourteenth century rather than, as is conventional, the end of the century, and this is one good reason to care about Wit and Will . Another is that it has considerable interest as a poem.