Langland’s Stance and Style

The strain of hilarious anger in PPl, based on an inconsolable sensitivity to the world’s pain, reminds one of Samuel Beckett, though without the latter’s blasphemy and lack of belief in the Passion as a redemptive act. WL, like an Old Testament prophet, feels “a duty of social exhortation and of spiritual striving both driven toward the unattainable”; he lashes out not merely as a moralist or satirist, but in anguish, in a way that emphasizes his own ostracism and failure.