Seldom has a poet been as consistently popular and admired by fellow poets, critics, and the public as has Geoffrey Chaucer. From the comments of his French contemporary Eustache Deschamps (c. 1340-1410) and the praise by imitation of the fifteenth century Chaucerians to the remarks of notable critics from John Dryden and Alexander Pope to Matthew Arnold and C. S. Lewis, Chaucer has been warmly applauded if not always understood. His poetic talent, “genial nature,” wit, charm, and sympathetic yet critical understanding of human diversity are particularly attractive. To D. S. Brewer, Chaucer “is our Goethe, a great artist who put his whole mind into his art.”
However, sometimes this praise has been misinformed, portraying Chaucer rather grandly as the founder of English literature and the prime shaper of the English language. In fact, English literature had a long and illustrious tradition before Chaucer, and the development of Modern English from the London East Midland dialect of Chaucer has little to do with the poet. Chaucer has also been credited with a series of firsts. G. L. Kittredge identified Troilus and Criseyde as “the first novel, in the modern sense, that ever was written in the world.” Its characters, to John Speirs, are also poetic firsts: Pandarus “the first rounded comic creation of substantial magnitude in English literature,” and Criseyde “the first complete character of a woman in English literature.” Others see Chaucer’s poetry as “Renaissance” in outlook, a harbinger of the humanism of the modern world. Such views reveal an element of surprise on the critics’ part that from the midst of Middle English such a poetic genius should emerge. In fact, typical discussions of Chaucer’s career, dividing it into three stages as it develops from French influence (seen in the dream allegories) to Italian tendencies (in Troilus and Criseyde, for example) and finally to English realism (in The Canterbury Tales), imply an evolutionary view not only of Chaucer’s poetry but also of English literary history. These stages supposedly reflect the gradual rejection of medieval conventionalism and the movement toward modern realism.
Whatever Chaucer’s varied achievements are, the rejection of conventions, rhetoric, types, symbols, and authorities is not among them. Charles Muscatine has shown, moreover, that Chaucer’s “realism” is as French and conventional as are his early allegories. Chaucer’s poetry should be judged within the conventions of his time. He did experiment with verse forms, establishing a decasyllabic line that, to become the iambic pentameter of the sonnet, blank verse, and heroic couplet, is English poetry’s most enduring line. His talent, however, lies in manipulating the authorities, the rhetoric, and conventional “topics” and in his mastery of the “art poetical.” As A. C. Spearing notes, “Once we become aware of Chaucer’s ’art poetical,’ we gain a deeper insight into his work by seeing how what appears natural in it is in fact achieved not carelessly but by the play of genius upon convention and contrivance.”
Such an approach to Chaucer will recognize his achievement as the greatest poet of medieval England, not as a forerunner of modernism. It will note his remaking of French, Latin, and Italian sources and treatment of secular and religious allegory as being, in their own way, as original as his creation of such characters as the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner. Chaucer’s achievement is in his ability to juxtapose various medieval outlooks to portray complex ideas in human terms, with wit and humor, to include both “heigh sentence” and “solaas and myrthe,” and to merge the naturalistic detail with the symbolic pattern. In this attempt to synthesize the everyday with the supernatural and the homely with the philosophical, and in his insistence on inclusiveness—on presenting both the angels and the gargoyles—Chaucer is the supreme example of the Gothic artist.