John Gower

Johan Gower (1325-1408) was a great scholar and an English poet. Though, he was a contemporary and friend of Chaucer, he was of an older school.

He was born in c.1325 and belonged to Kentish family. He had deeper knowledge of three languages, Latin, French, and English. His poems of all languages were remarkable and eqal in all three literatures.

Gower wrote Speculum Meditantis or Mirour de l’omme in French, Vox Clamantis in (c.1381) in Latin, and Confessio Amantis in (c.1390) was in English. Last third Confessio Amantis has Latin title but it was in English.

Gower himself wrote that Confessio Amantis was written to the command of a king. He had great narrative power to descried things. He was buried in London.

Gower preferred to live in city. His friend, Geoffrey Chaucer, described about him as the moral Gower; Confessio Amantis was a octosyllabic couplet of French romance. It has more than a hundred stories are translated from Ovid and other Latin or Greek authors.

"Speculum Meditantis," the "Thinker's Mirror," was written in French, which was lost for long, but recovered lately. "Vox Clamantis," the "Voice of One Crying," was written in Latin, which is an allegorising, moralising poem, "cataloguing the vice of the time," and suggested by the Wat Tyler insurrection, 1381. "Confessio Amantis," "Confession of a Lover," was written in English, treating of the course of love, the morals and metaphysics of it, illustrated by a profusion of apposite tales. He was appropriately called by Chaucer the "moral Grower". His tomb is in St. Mary's, Southwark.