Title Background

The Rhetoric of Excess in Winner and Waster.

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.