Geoffrey Chaucer

The medieval author of The Canterbury Tales is most remembered for his poetry, but he also wrote prose, worked in public service jobs and was inadvertently an avid historian of the era

Biographical History :

Geoffrey Chaucer could have been born anytime between 1328 and 1346 in England, but 1340 is generally accepted as the correct year. He died in 1400 and was the first person to be buried in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. He was probably educated at Cambridge and spent most of his life in various public posts. He was married and had at least two children, but these data are incomplete at best since Chaucer was a common name at the time and there were more than one Geoffrey.

Poetry :

Chaucer distinguished himself as a poet and standardized rhyme royal form. This form has stanzas of seven lines, each with ten syllables. The rhyme scheme of the stanzas are ababbcc. Chaucer also often used the heroic, the combined form.

The Canterbury Tales :

Canterbury Cathedral Today the Canterbury Tales is Chaucer's masterpiece. After an introduction of different characters makes pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral to tell their colorful stories. Because of Chaucer's great descriptions of medieval life and personalities of characters, it is still considered a masterpiece, although it was never finished.

Prose :

Chaucer is remembered as a poet, but there are two examples of his prose, which have survived. One is a translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, and the second is his Treatise on the Astrolabe. The latter was written for a 10-year old known as "little Lewis", which is believed to have been Chaucer's son by a mistress.

Chaucer's Language :

Geoffrey Chaucer probably spoke and wrote in French from childhood through his early adult years. His great works were written in Middle English.

Perhaps the easiest way to make it clear that the sources of Chaucer's power will be through a rather formal summary.

His personality. Chaucer's personality stands out in his writings clearly and most desire. It should be noted that, like some others of the greatest poets, he was not only a poet but also a man of practical affairs, in the eyes of his associates first and mainly a courtier, diplomat and civil servant. His extensive experience with people and things are manifest in the life-similarity and mature force in his poetry, and it accounts for part of the broad truth of all but his earliest work, which makes it much poetry is not an age, but at all times. Some of conventional Medievalism still clings to Chaucer in externals, as we shall see, but in vigilance, independence of thought and a certain directness of speech, he talks about universal humanity. His practical experience helps to explain why and, unlike most great poets, he does not belong primarily to idealists. Fine feeling he is not missing, he loved external beauty - some of his most pleasing passages expressing his enthusiasm for nature and down to the end of his life, he never lost the zest for fanciful romance. His mind and eyes were keen, besides, for moral qualities, he penetrated directly through all pretext of lies and hypocrisy, but how thoroughly he understood and respected honest worth appears in the image of the poor Parson in the prologue to "The Canterbury Tales. Even quiet and self moreover, Chaucer was genial and sympathetic towards all mankind. But all this does not declare him a positive idealist, and in reality, but he was willing to accept the world as he found it - he had no reformer's dream of "shaking it to bits and transforms it closer to its heart's desire. His moral character, yes, it was easy-going, he was appropriate poet of the Court circle, with much of the better courtier view. At today's tasks, he has worked long and faithfully, but he also loved the comfort, and he had nothing of the martyr's instinct. To him human life was a big procession, of boundless interest to be observed keenly and reproduced for the reader's enjoyment in works of objective literary art. The countless tragedies in life he remarked with kindly pity, but he felt no urge to dash itself against the existing barriers in the world in efforts to secure a better future for coming generations. In a word, Chaucer is an artist of broad artistic vision that art is its own excuse for being. And when all is said some readers would feel different with him because of his art, he has done what no one else in his place might have been, and he has left out the image of himself, very real and human throughout the Bay a half thousand years. Religion, we should add, was for him, as so many men in the world, a sort of secondary and formal things. In his early works there is much conventional piety, no doubt, sincere as far as it goes, and he always took a strong intellectual interest in the problems of medieval theology, but he was steadily independent in his philosophical outlook and actually quite skeptical of any clear dogmas. Even in his art Chaucer's absence at the highest will-power produced a rather striking formal weakness of his many long poems he actually finished a little. For this, however, it is perhaps excuse that he could write only in increments hardly removed from the business and sleep. In 'The Canterbury Tales' yes, the plan is almost hopelessly ambitious, the more than twenty stories actually completed their eighteen thousand lines, is only one fifth of the planned number.

Yet several of them do not really belong to the series, which consists of stanza forms, they are selected from his earlier poems here and in use, and on average they are less good than those which he wrote for their current seats (in rhymed pentameter couplet that he adopted from the French).

His sense of humor. In nothing is Chaucer's personality and his poetry more enjoyable than in the rich humor which pervades them through. Sometimes, as in his treatment of the popular medieval beast-epic material in the Nun's Priest's Tale of the Fox and the Cock, the humor in the form of a noisy farce, but much more is it of the finer intellectual type, such as a casual reader can not catch, but touching with perfect sureness and charming lightness of all discrepancies in life, always, even in friendly spirit. No weakness is too insignificant to make Chaucer's observation, while if he chooses to denounce the hypocrisy of Pardon and secularism in the monk, he has their weaknesses, sources of amusement (and object-lessons as well) for all future generations.

He is one of the greatest of all narrative poets. Chaucer is an excellent poet, but few of his texts have come down to us, and his fame must always rest largely on his stories. Here, the first he has unfailing liquid. It was with speed, apparently with ease, and with masterful certainty that he poured out his long series of live and wonderful adventure. It is true that in his early, imitative, work he shares the medieval error of wordiness, digression, and abstract symbolism, and, like most medieval writers, he chose instead to convert material from the large modern shop, but to invent stories of his own. But these are really very small area. He has great range, even of narrative forms: draw allegories; love stories of many kinds, romances, both religious and secular, tales of chivalrous exploit, just as in the case of Knight, humorous extravaganza and jocose reproductions of popular coarse material --something in Anyway, in almost all medieval type.

Thorough knowledge of and confident portrayal of men and women who belong to his mature work extending over many different types of character. It is commonplace to say that the prologue to 'The Canterbury Tales' presents in its twenty portraits of almost all modern English class, except the very lowest, created to live forever in the finest range of characters sketches preserved anywhere in the literature, and in his other work the same power only occurs in less striking degree.

His poems are also essential and thoroughly dramatic, dealing with very vivid life in real and varied action. To be sure, Chaucer holds all the medieval love for logical thinking, and he takes great pleasure in psychological analysis, but when he introduces these things (apart from the tendency of medieval diffuseness) they are true to the situation and actually serves to increase tension. There is great interest in the question often raised about if he had lived in an era in which Elizabethan, when drama was the dominant literary form, he also would have been a playwright.

As a descriptive writer (of things and people) he shows equal skill. Whatever his scenes or objects, he sees them with perfect clearness and implement them in full life-equality before the reader's eyes, sometimes even with the minuteness of the nineteenth century novelist. And no one understands more thoroughly the art to convey the general impression with perfect sureness, with a foreground, which a few characteristic details stand out in picturesque and telling clearness.

Chaucer is an unswerving champion of poetic form. His stanza combinations reproduce all the well-proportioned grace of his French models, and the pentameter riming, combined with his later work he gives the perfect ease and metrical variety which is suitable for liquid thought. In all his poetry is probably not a single defect line. And yet within a hundred years after his death, such was the irony of English pronunciation had changed so much that his meter was considered rude and barbaric, and not until the nineteenth century was its principles again fully understood. His language, we should add, is modern, according to the technical classification, and is really so much like the shape of our own day, like in a century before his time, but it's still only early modern English, and a little definitely directed study is necessary for any contemporary reader before its beauty can be adequately recognized.