“Here is God’s plenty.”

-John Dryden

Geoffrey Chaucer was one of the language’s biggest-hearted, sharpest-tongued, farthest-seeing poets—souls—really. Delve into the sturdy, winking, welcoming environment of his Middle English strophes, and before long you’ll be kissing your fingertips like an Italian chef. That Chaucer profoundly influenced Shakespeare is the gift that keeps on giving; a reader’s experience of their conversation “deepens like a coastal shelf,” to borrow a line from Philip Larkin. Certainly, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen both, in some crucial sense, emerge from the opening lines of Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale;” and the Bard’s late tragicomedy, Troilus and Cressida, was of course, given a book-length treatment by Chaucer some two hundred years prior. But not only did Chaucer bring sunlight and color to bear on English humor and prosody, his work shaped storytelling across a variety of literary traditions. It is difficult to imagine the roadside tavern scenes in Don Quixote without picturing the motley cross-section of English society, assembled at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, London, in advance of their grand pilgrimage to Canterbury. Chaucer does what all the best party hosts (and writers) in history have done: he puts a group of wondrously engrossing characters together in a room and gets them talking.

“Cometh al this newe corn fro yeer to yere.”

-Chaucer, Parlement of Foules

Among his many works, Chaucer authored Troilus and Creseyde, Parlement of Foules, The House of Fame, The Book of the Duchess, and his most enduring work, the unfinished masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales. He came from a long line of wine-makers, and was close friends with John of Gaunt. He was husband to the well-connected Philippa de Roet, and served as a diplomat for King Edward III and courtier in France and elsewhere.

Of his irony, one critic remarked it was so vast as to appear invisible. Such was his influence on the language itself. Happy reading.

The Legend of Good Women

Poetry

Geoffrey Chaucer

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