The Rhetoric of Excess in Winner and Waster.

The stable perspective and conservative voice of the speaker in the prologue of WW cannot be identified as consistently authorial in a poem that features such a “generous production of meanings and voices.” Neither the clear-cut hierarchy of winning over wasting (as in PPl), nor a reconciliation of the two principles in generosity (as in the Nicomachean Ethics), nor a subordination of providence to expenditure as magnanimity can by itself suffice. No interdependence is possible of two terms shown to be so unstable. The poet, having begun with a straightforward dialectical form and orthodox topic, may have come to see himself implicated as a waster.