Gower, JOHN, English poet, was born probably about 1330, and seems to have belonged to a family that owned land both in Suffolk and in Kent. But little is known of his life save that he was rich and well educated, did not marry till late in life (probably in 1397), became blind about 1400, and died in the later half of 1408. His tomb is still to be seen in St Saviour's, Southwark. He was a personal friend of Chaucer, who, in dedicating to him his Troilus and Cressida, addresses him as the 'moral Gower'—an epithet that has indissolubly linked itself with his name. Near the conclusion of the Confessio Amantis Gower makes Venus in some copies pay a warm compliment to Chaucer as her 'disciple and poet,' which is followed immediately by lines expressing warm loyalty towards Richard II. Both these passages are omitted in the copy dedicated to Henry of Lancaster, then Earl of Derby (afterwards Henry IV.), which appeared at a time when Chaucer was in trouble with the government, and this fact, taken in conjunction with Chaucer's expressed dislike (Introduction to the Man of Lawes prologue) to a certain kind of sensational stories—of 'unkynde ('unnatural') abhominaciouns,' which he exemplifies by the stories of Canace and Apollinus of Tyre—two of the best told tales interspersed in the Confessio Amantis—led Tyrwhitt to the conjecture that the friendship between the two poets was interrupted in their old age. But in this there is really no ground for any inference further than that Gower was merely a timid and time-serving man; while the conjecture is completely demolished by the discovery that Chaucer's poem was written first (before 1385), and by the fact that Chaucer took the substance of the Man of Lawes Tale direct from Nicholas Trivet's French prose chronicle of the Life of Constance (written about 1334), and not indirectly through Gower's version of the same, as was supposed by Tyrwhitt, Wright, and most scholars down to the appearance of Mr Brock's English translation of Trivet in Originals and Analogues of some of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, published for the Chaucer Society (1872-75).
Gower wrote three large works in three languages, the Speculum Meditantis, in French verse, rediscovered at Cambridge in 1896; the Vox Clamantis, a tedious Latin elegiac poem, written 1382-84, describing Wat Tyler's rebellion in 1381, full of dreary allegorising and moralisation (edited by Rev. H. O. Coxe, Roxburghe Club, 1850); and the long poem entitled Confessio Amantis, written 'in our English . . . for England's sake,' of which the date is uncertain, but it must have been in existence in 1392-93. In a passage in the earlier edition of the last work, dedicated to Richard II., he tells us how he met the king's barge one day when rowing down the Thames at London, and how the king invited him on board, and commanded him to write a book upon some new matter. There are extant also fifty French ballads, written by Gower in his youth (Roxburghe Club, 1818).
Gower's Confessio Amantis consists of a prologue and eight books, written in verses of eight syllables, rhyming in pairs. The long prologue gives a sombre account of the state of the world at that time, and the poem opens by introducing the author himself in the character of an unhappy lover. Venus then appears to him, and appoints her priest called Genius to hear the lover's confession of all the sins he has committed against love. Under each several head the confessor consoles him and gives him warning by relating apposite stories of the fatal effects of each passion in the experiences of former lovers in like case. It ends with the lover's petition in a strophic poem addressed to Venus, her judgment, and finally the lover's cure and absolution. The stories inserted are taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Gesta Romanorum, the medieval histories of Troy and Alexander the Great, from the Pantheon and Speculum Regum of Godfrey of Viterbo, the romance of Sir Lancelot, and the Chronicles of Cassiodorus and Isidorus. The mixture of Ovidian and Christian morality is often incongruous enough, and the whole poem is dull and prolix to the last degree. Without originality, narrative power, pathos, or humour, Gower yet commands respect for the laborious equality of his verse, and his work remains a splendid monument of English. Mr Lowell is too severe upon his uniformity of commonplace, his omnipresent tediousness, his imperturbable narrative, the tremendous hydraulic power of his allegory to squeeze out all feeling and freshness, the frozen levels of his verse, and the inevitable recurrence of his rhyme regularly pertinacious as the tick of an eight-day clock; although indeed it cannot altogether be denied that 'he has positively raised tediousness to the precision of science, and has made dullness an heirloom for the students of our literary history.' The best editions are by Dr Reinhold Pauli (3 vols. Lond. 1857) and G. C. Macaulay (4 vols. 1899-1901, vol. i. giving Gower's works in French).