Doggerel Verse and Critical Recoil

ABSTRACT Early 20th‐century critics rediscovered a literary concept called “doggerel” in Geoffrey Chaucer's Sir Thopas and in John Lydgate's mid‐clash poetic line, using the term to help them categorize and periodize the shift in English literature from medieval to modern. A close look at this undertheorized term and its early iterations in Chaucer's poetry and Lydgate's verse makes clear that doggerel has been a crucial if underthought player not only in English metrical development, but also in the history of literary critique, as a versified counterstrategy that maps the contours of the unpoetic, challenges budding poetic norms, and works simultaneously to introduce and to upend traditional critical notions like the poet's ear.