Geoffrey Chaucer: The Father of English Poetry and the Maker of the Canterbury Tales

At the head of the long and crowded tradition of English poetry stands a single figure to whom every poet who has written in the language since is, in some measure, an heir. Geoffrey Chaucer, who lived through the second half of the fourteenth century and died in the first year of the fifteenth, was not the first person to compose verse in English, nor even the first to do so with skill; but he was the first to write English poetry of such ambition, range, and assured artistry that it could stand without apology beside the great literatures of France, of Italy, and of the ancient world, and the first whose work has been read continuously, and with admiration, from his own lifetime to the present day. He is the author of The Canterbury Tales, the most celebrated poem in the English language before the age of Shakespeare and Milton, and of Troilus and Criseyde, a tragic romance that many careful readers have judged the finest sustained narrative poem of the English Middle Ages. He was the first writer to be buried in the corner of Westminster Abbey that afterward, because of him, came to be known as Poets' Corner. For more than six centuries he has been honored, in a phrase that the poet and critic John Dryden made famous in the year 1700, as the father of English poetry.

There is a curious paradox at the center of any attempt to write the life of Chaucer. He is, in one sense, among the best-documented Englishmen of the fourteenth century: close to five hundred separate records survive that name him or bear directly upon his affairs, for he spent his working life in the service of the crown and of the city of London, and the offices he held generated accounts, warrants, writs, and receipts that the careful bureaucracy of the age preserved. From these documents it is possible to follow him with remarkable precision through a busy public career as a courtier, a soldier, a diplomat, a customs official, a member of Parliament, and an administrator of royal building works. And yet not one of these papers so much as mentions that the man they concern was a poet, or names a single one of his writings, or records a single opinion or feeling of his own. The result is a strange double portrait. Of Chaucer the public servant we know a great deal; of Chaucer the poet, the inward man who created the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner and the sorrowing Criseyde, the official record tells us nothing whatever. We do not know with certainty the year of his birth, we cannot fix the date of composition of most of his poems, and not one line survives in his own hand. The poet must be reconstructed almost entirely from the poems themselves.

Chaucer's central and most consequential achievement was a decision that can be stated very simply: he wrote in English. To a modern reader that choice may seem unremarkable, even inevitable, but in the England of Chaucer's youth it was neither. Three centuries after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the English language still carried the stamp of conquest and subordination. French, in its English and continental forms, was the language of the royal court, of the law, of the higher nobility, and of polite and fashionable society; Latin was the language of the Church, of learning, of philosophy and science and the keeping of records; English was the speech of the common people, of the unlettered majority, a language fractured into regional dialects, little written, and held by many educated people to be too rude and impoverished a medium for serious literature. Chaucer, who read and wrote French and Latin with ease and who knew Italian as well, could have made his reputation in any of the prestige languages. Instead he chose to compose his major works in the English of London and the East Midlands, and by the sustained brilliance of what he made in it he demonstrated, once and for all, that English was capable of poetry of the very highest order. In doing so he did much to raise the dialect of the capital toward the status of a standard literary language, and he gave English-speaking poets a native ancestor and a native tradition to inherit.

The poems themselves reveal a writer of extraordinary range and an even more extraordinary humanity. Chaucer could compose the formal, dreamlike, philosophically searching verse of the courtly dream-vision; he could sustain across thousands of lines the psychological tragedy of Troilus and Criseyde, with its tenderness, its irony, and its grave meditation on love and fortune and the will of God; and he could, in The Canterbury Tales, assemble a whole society of English men and women, from the courteous Knight to the drunken Miller, from the worldly and much-married Wife of Bath to the corrupt and uncanny Pardoner, and give each of them a living voice and a tale to tell. What unites this great variety is a quality of mind that has no real precedent in earlier English writing: a warm, amused, sharp-eyed, endlessly curious attention to human beings as they actually are, observed without illusion and yet, for the most part, without cruelty. Chaucer is the first writer in English whose characters step off the page as recognizable individuals, and the first whose pervasive, gentle, double-edged irony invites the reader to share the author's own delighted understanding of human folly and human worth. It is this, as much as his technical mastery, that has kept his poetry alive.

Chaucer's life was lived in one of the most turbulent and consequential periods of English history. He was born in the early 1340s and died in 1400, and in those six decades he saw the reigns of three kings, Edward the Third, Richard the Second, and Henry the Fourth, the last of whom seized the throne by force in the year before the poet's death. He lived through the long agony of the Hundred Years' War between England and France, in which he himself fought and was taken prisoner; through the catastrophe of the Black Death, the plague that first struck England when he was a small child and returned again and again across his lifetime; through the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, whose rebels poured into London through the very gate above which Chaucer was then living; and through the bitter political feuds of Richard the Second's reign, the Great Schism that divided the Western Church between rival popes, and the rise of the religious dissent associated with John Wycliffe and the Lollards. Through all of this Chaucer was a working public servant with a living to earn, and his poetry was composed in the margins of a crowded official life, in the hours he could steal from the customs house, the diplomatic mission, and the building accounts. That so original and so abundant a body of work was produced under such conditions is itself a measure of his genius.

The pages that follow trace that life and that work together: the England into which Chaucer was born and the trilingual literary world he would transform; his origins in a prosperous family of London wine merchants; his youth as a page in a great aristocratic household and his service as a soldier and prisoner of war in France; his marriage and his lifelong connection to the powerful house of Lancaster; his decades of labor as a diplomat and customs official; the journeys to Italy that brought him into contact with the poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio; the long sequence of his writings, from the early dream-visions through the masterpiece of Troilus and Criseyde to the vast unfinished design of The Canterbury Tales; his shaping of the English language as a literary instrument; his later years of office, hardship, and final security; and the immense and unbroken history of his reputation and influence, from the poets who called him master within a generation of his death to the readers and scholars who study and enjoy him still.

England in the Age of Chaucer