The Columbia History of British Poetry by Carl Woodring, James Shapiro Page A
Authors: Carl Woodring, James Shapiro
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the 15th Century." ELH 54 (1987): 761-799.
Minnis, Alastair J., and A. B. Scott. Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100-1375 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Offord, M. Y., ed. The Parlement of the Thre Ages. Early English Text Society 246. Oxford, 1959. Repr. 1967.
Pearsall, Derek. Old English and Middle English Poetry. London: Routledge, 1977.
Trigg, Stephanie, ed. Wynnere and Wastoure. Early English Text Society 297. Oxford, 1990.
Page 55
Chaucer
George D. Economou
While greatly susceptible to the influence of his reading, Geoffrey Chaucer was a poet who rarely wrote without an experimental or innovative purpose or result. Chaucer's intellectual and literary curiosity and receptivity contributed an indispensable source of strength to his performance as a writer. The major achievements of his career, from such early dream visions as The Book of the Duchess (1368-1372) and The Parliament of Fowls (1380-1382) to the Troilus (1382-1386) and The Canterbury Tales (1388-1400), as well as unfinished works like The House of Fame (1378-1380) and The Legend of Good Women (1385-1386), which he appears to have abandoned for new projects of greater promise, all share qualities that reveal the unique nature of the Chaucerian enterprise. These qualities include a magisterial command of poetic line and literary form, a superb sense of mimesis and story telling, and an unrivaled gift for characterization and portraiture. His power as a narrative poet can be matched by a rare lyri-cal intensity, as in the artful introduction of several lyric passages in the Troilus at critical moments in its action. A keen ironist with a many-sided sense of humor, Chaucer explores the relationship between art and life as has no other poet before or after him.
Impressed by the energies and inquiries of his predecessor poets, both ancient and medieval, Chaucer moves along a path that at first glance looks familiar but which has actually never before been taken. Whatever may have fueled its beginnings, the Chaucerian poem, even when left unfinished, drives on its own course to its own destination. If the term avant-garde denotes the development of new and experimen-
Page 56
tal concepts in art, then Chaucer was a kind of one-man avant-garde of fourteenth-century English poetry. What he learned from the poets who interested him gave him the kind of independence we may add to the qualities of variety and comprehensiveness John Dryden included among his reasons for calling Chaucer the "father of English poetry."
Recognized as a poet of stature in his own lifetime, Chaucer began to reach a truly national audience by the early decades of the fifteenth century, and with the first printed edition of The Canterbury Tales in 1476 by William Caxton, his reputation was well established and remained so through the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, and their contemporaries had read him, but by Dryden's time Chaucer's work was relatively overlooked, accompanied by a corresponding hiatus in printed editions. It was Dryden who restored and critically defined his reputation. Chaucer has since enjoyed an increasingly important place in the literary canon of the English-speaking world; his poetry has been a regular subject of study at European and Asian universities, and critics as well as scholars have produced an impressive body of secondary literature concerning his poetry during this century.
An example of the highest level of critical debate stimulated by Chaucer's work can be seen in two responses to a single detail in the Wife of Bath's portrait. In the older historicist view of the Wife of Bath, informed more by group, moral rather than personal, artistic values, her deafness signifies the spiritual bankruptcy of her irredeemable, fallen nature, which does not hear the Gospel's message of charity, through the applicability of the scriptural admonition, "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear" (Matt.
Minnis, Alastair J., and A. B. Scott. Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100-1375 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Offord, M. Y., ed. The Parlement of the Thre Ages. Early English Text Society 246. Oxford, 1959. Repr. 1967.
Pearsall, Derek. Old English and Middle English Poetry. London: Routledge, 1977.
Trigg, Stephanie, ed. Wynnere and Wastoure. Early English Text Society 297. Oxford, 1990.
Page 55
Chaucer
George D. Economou
While greatly susceptible to the influence of his reading, Geoffrey Chaucer was a poet who rarely wrote without an experimental or innovative purpose or result. Chaucer's intellectual and literary curiosity and receptivity contributed an indispensable source of strength to his performance as a writer. The major achievements of his career, from such early dream visions as The Book of the Duchess (1368-1372) and The Parliament of Fowls (1380-1382) to the Troilus (1382-1386) and The Canterbury Tales (1388-1400), as well as unfinished works like The House of Fame (1378-1380) and The Legend of Good Women (1385-1386), which he appears to have abandoned for new projects of greater promise, all share qualities that reveal the unique nature of the Chaucerian enterprise. These qualities include a magisterial command of poetic line and literary form, a superb sense of mimesis and story telling, and an unrivaled gift for characterization and portraiture. His power as a narrative poet can be matched by a rare lyri-cal intensity, as in the artful introduction of several lyric passages in the Troilus at critical moments in its action. A keen ironist with a many-sided sense of humor, Chaucer explores the relationship between art and life as has no other poet before or after him.
Impressed by the energies and inquiries of his predecessor poets, both ancient and medieval, Chaucer moves along a path that at first glance looks familiar but which has actually never before been taken. Whatever may have fueled its beginnings, the Chaucerian poem, even when left unfinished, drives on its own course to its own destination. If the term avant-garde denotes the development of new and experimen-
Page 56
tal concepts in art, then Chaucer was a kind of one-man avant-garde of fourteenth-century English poetry. What he learned from the poets who interested him gave him the kind of independence we may add to the qualities of variety and comprehensiveness John Dryden included among his reasons for calling Chaucer the "father of English poetry."
Recognized as a poet of stature in his own lifetime, Chaucer began to reach a truly national audience by the early decades of the fifteenth century, and with the first printed edition of The Canterbury Tales in 1476 by William Caxton, his reputation was well established and remained so through the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, and their contemporaries had read him, but by Dryden's time Chaucer's work was relatively overlooked, accompanied by a corresponding hiatus in printed editions. It was Dryden who restored and critically defined his reputation. Chaucer has since enjoyed an increasingly important place in the literary canon of the English-speaking world; his poetry has been a regular subject of study at European and Asian universities, and critics as well as scholars have produced an impressive body of secondary literature concerning his poetry during this century.
An example of the highest level of critical debate stimulated by Chaucer's work can be seen in two responses to a single detail in the Wife of Bath's portrait. In the older historicist view of the Wife of Bath, informed more by group, moral rather than personal, artistic values, her deafness signifies the spiritual bankruptcy of her irredeemable, fallen nature, which does not hear the Gospel's message of charity, through the applicability of the scriptural admonition, "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear" (Matt.
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