The Tree and the Chaplet: Wanting the Laurel in Skelton’s The Laurel

This essay argues that the various images of the laurel wreath and laureation in John Skelton’s The Laurel are marked by ambivalence. Far from a unified and full-throated celebration of his own achievements, the poem partakes of good-humored self-parody, serious self-mockery, and open disgust to undermine and question the political and aesthetic significance of the laurel, and what one must do to achieve it. The Laurel acknowledges and mocks the laureate’s impossible balancing act between a prophetic role as vates and a political role as orator regius; this essay suggests that this tension is played out in the poem as Skelton considers the appealing immediacy of oral poetry and the compromises of written poetry.