SOURCE: "The Alliterative Revival," in Essays on Middle English, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1955, pp. 46-96.

In this excerpt, Everett argues that the so-called alliterative revival was actually part of a continuous tradition and that Pearl can be compared to Milton's Lycidas and Dante's Divine Comedy.

The Alliterative Gi; the Alliterative morte Arthure and Other Poems =~ Smorte Arthure and Other Poems

Nothing that has survived from the early Middle English period prepares us for that later outpouring of alliterative poetry which has conveniently, though probably inaccurately, been termed the 'alliterative revival'. Suddenly (so it appears to us), in the middle of the fourteenth century, a number of poets began to use alliterative verse in the kinds of poetry then most popular—romances, chronicles, political satire, religious and moral allegory—and, continuing throughout this century and the next, they produced, among a good deal that is second-rate or worse...