Forgotten Ground Regained
John D. Niles
John D. Niles is Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison andProfessor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Two poems of his in alliterative meter, "Night Out"; and "Fair Day" are included in DennisWise's critical anthology of modern alliterative verse. These were originally published in Niles’article “The Old Alliterative Verse Form as a Medium for Poetry,” Mosaic 11:4 (1978): 19–33.
Professor Niles is best known for his work on Beowulf and other Old English poetry. Among hisbooks on that topic are Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1983); Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts (Turnhout,Belgium: Brepols, 2007); and God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of OldEnglish Poetry (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2019). A chapbook of his poems, Chapman’sPack, was brought out by Parallel Press, Madison WI, in 2003. His most recent book,Webspinner: Songs, Stories, and Reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller (JacksonMI: University of Mississippi Press, 2022) is based on fieldwork he undertook in Scotland in the1980s.