William Dunbar : a critical exposition of the poems

There are many books to be written on Dunbar, and this one neither seeks to compete with those already - written nor to discourage future work; on the contrary, this is merely one contribution - the one most immediately necessary, and which I am most able to do. But there is room for a small work reviewing Dunbar studies up to date, as a guide to and clearing-house for, future work. I have tried here to do a sketch of such a work in my bibliography: this is only an outline, but space forbade any more exhaustive approach. Another great need is for book-length studies of Dunbar's language (long-overdue), his metric (still premature, pending more evidence from phonetic studies), and of his imagery - the last tracing its sources in the common stock of medieval culture, rather along the lines of Isabel Hyde's valuable but too brief study (see Bibliographical Review, Section E). These books should, properly, have been written before the present one; but what is desirable is not always practicable. Another work of criticism can follow them, when the time is rip