The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet

This edition presents, for the first time, the entire oeuvre of the Pearl poet with both the original Middle English works and complete verse translations. Poet and scholar Casey Finch uses anapestic tetrameters (and iambic tetrameter for Pearl) in his translations rather than the accented tetrameters of the originals, thus achieving the rhythmic regularity the poems would have displayed when performed to music, as they surely were meant to be. Finch's translations are printed facing the best modern editions of the poems, those of Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron and of Clifford Peterson.

The late Casey Finch taught in the Department of English at New York University. He was the author of two books of poetry, The Forbidden Book (1981) and Harming Others (1992), and several scholarly articles on literary topics.