The Columbia History of British Poetry by Carl Woodring, James Shapiro

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How al passeth and halt here no sojour,
Wastyng away as doth a somer flour.
                                             (V.35653568)
The truth of the message, the moral, is what matters. One would be hard put to state the moral of Troilus and Criseyde . Lydgate articulates and illustrates the truisms admired in his age without the ability to embody them in memorable language. With the exception of his Life of Our Lady , where his verse rises to some beautiful ornate effects, the only line of Lydgate that stays in the memory is from a lyric, "All stant on chaunge like a midsommer roose"and his editor suggests that this line is probably proverbial. Lydgate is, in a manner of speaking, the poet of the proverb, the earnest truism offered without Chaucerian irony or any exploration of complexity.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor government official from 1387 until his death in 1426, grew up in the long shadow cast by Chaucer. His oeuvre is peculiar: some occasional and religious verse; a translation of Christine de Pisan's L'Epistre au Dieu d'Amours (1399); a semi-serious confessional poem, La Male Règle ; a version of the Speculum principis ; and a curious linked sequence of stories known today as the Series . Hoccleve is very insecure: he raises his voice in compliment and assent, rather than in Chaucer's tone of amused intimacy, and the occasions he celebrates are much more public. He seems to have aspired to join in the literary game of pretending to defend women, but where Chaucer is too wily to be nailed to a position, Hoccleve merely seems confused. The Letter of Cupid can only be seen as an attack on women by the exercise of giant ingenuity, and Hoccleve's pretended fear of women's angry

 

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response to it in the Series has the air of an all-male joke. In the Series , Hoccleve seems to have wanted to imitate Chaucer's first-person narrative frame and literary personality in a linked set of stories. He presents himself as the maligned and misunderstood friend of women who has to defend his innocence constantly (in the model of Chaucer in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women ), and as a penniless, mildly dissolute recovered lunatic who cannot persuade his acquaintances of his restored sanity. This persona is sufficiently bizarre to engage much of his modern interest: most of the critical industry has been devoted to diagnosing Hoccleve's mental condition.
Unlike Langland, whose waking madness signifies his alienated authorial status in a corrupt and confusing world and confers on him something of the aura of a holy fool, Hoccleve's real or artistic lapse from sanity is offered as a reason for adhering more closely to the religious and social norms of his day. He translates worthy workssuch as Henry Suso's How to Learn to Die in order to settle his wits, and provides careful moralizations for the other two stories in the Series . "Freend, I nat medle of matires grete," Hoccleve tells his interlocutor, and shrinks throughout from anything controversial. The rise of Lollardy since Chaucer's death led would-be official court poets into declarations of orthodoxy; it is significant that Hoccleve should explicitly reproach the Lollard Knight, Sir John Oldcastle, for reading Scripture instead of romances and the histories of Troy and Thebes. Hoccleve, like Lydgate, retreats to the moral platitude and safe didacticism. The inviting role of involved court poet needs authority: Hoccleve only wavers between the obscure personal confession and professions of solidarity and partisanship. His lengthiest and most popular work, the Regement of Princes (1411), shows him in full retreat into the part of poet as provider of wise truisms; a reminder that Chaucer's Melibee was one of his most copied works in the fifteenth century.
An incomplete, anonymous poem of the mid-fifteenth century, the Court of Sapience , belongs to the same tradition, though we know nothing at all about