George Russell and George Kane discuss the fourteenth-century English allegorical poem Piers Plowman. Wandering in the English countryside, a poet stops to rest, falls asleep, and dreams. His vision is filled with fantastic images of right and wrong, reason and conscience, truth and fraud, virtue, life and death. While such dreams or visions are as old as literature itself, Piers Plowman, they say, is a supreme example of moral allegory that investigates individual and social behavior.
The second segment [22:30] is a commentary by Robert Gingher on the stone megaliths of Stonehenge, located on England’s Salisbury Plain.
At the time of this conversation, Russell, a Fellow at the National Humanities Center (1982-83), was professor of English at the University of Melbourne. Kane was professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Gingher was a book reviewer for the Greensboro (N.C.) News and Record
This edition of Soundings was conducted by Wayne J. Pond.
