alliterative revival

alliterative revival, a term covering the group of late 14th‐century English poems written in an alliterative metre similar to that of Old English verse but less regular (notably in Langland's Piers Plowman) and sometimes—as in the anonymous Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—using rhyme and elaborate stanza structure. This group may represent more a continuation than a revival of the alliterative tradition.