Chaucer was deeply infl uenced by Dante, Petrarch, and
above all Boccaccio, and his poetry becomes increas-
ingly cosmopolitan as he consciously participates in
the highest Western tradition of poetry. Like Dante and
Boccaccio he presents himself following in the great
classical line of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius
(Troilus 5.1792); of these Ovid was the most important
to him. Other cultural traditions are represented in his
work by his use of the 6th-century Consolation of Phi-
losophy of Boethius, which he translated in the early
1380s, and supremely, by his constant allusions to the
Bible, the liturgy, and Christian doctrine.
Works
Chaucer’s earliest known original poem, The Book of
the Duchess (ca. 1368–72), was a response to the death
of Blanche, duchess of Lancaster, fi rst wife of John of
Gaunt. It draws largely on French models and is written
in a four-stress couplet form similar to French octosyl-
labics. Its narrator dreams of meeting a man in black
who is mourning the death of his lady, named “White”:
the characters bear some relationship to Chaucer, the
duke, and Blanche, but Chaucer’s use of the dream
form enables him to transcend historical circumstance
to explore the contraries of love and loss, joy and grief.
Three characteristics of the poem are notable as precur-
sors of his later work. First is his exploitation of conven-
tion in unconventional ways: most strikingly in death’s
invasion of the idyllic garden where the lover falls in
love. Second is the sophistication of Chaucer’s use of
a fi rst-person narrator. Despite his overtly muted role
within the dream he is a fi gure for the poet; and since
the dream takes place within his own mind, he is also
the originator of the encomium and lament spoken by
the man in black. Chaucer thus becomes the spokesman
for the duke both in fact and within the structure of the
poem. Third is its secular focus—a focus exceptional
for elegy, but typical of the great majority of Chaucer’s
works: Christianity is not denied, but the fi eld of poetic
“interest is this world, not the next.
Chaucer’s poetry of the 1370s and early 1380s con-
tinues to use French models—the Roman, Guillaume
de Machaut, Jean Froissart—but Ovidian and Italian
infl uences also appear. His major works of those years,
whose order of composition is uncertain, are The Pa r-
liament of Fowls, The Home of Fame, and possibly the
Knight’s Ta l e under the title of “Palamon and Arcite.”
The Parliament is probably Chaucer’s earliest poem
in the seven-line rime royal stanza, which he would
later use in the Troilus and the tales of pathos in the
Canterbury Tales. It may have been written for some
particular occasion, possibly to do with Richard II’s
future wife, Anne. It is a dream poem that analyzes the
various forms that earthly love can take, as illustrated
by the claustrophobic temple of Priapus, inhabited by
Venus, and by the hill of Nature, God’s “vicaire” or
deputy, before whom all the birds from the eagle to the
goose have assembled on St. Valentine’s Day to choose
their mates. The poem suggests a series of contraries
that it in fact refuses to endorse: both temple and hill
are contained within the same walled park; inscriptions
over the entrance promise bliss and threaten sterility
and death, but the entrance is single; the birds that are
given their mates and the three eagles that endure suf-
fering and long service in love are alike under the aegis
of Nature; the broader context for the dream is Scipio’s
vision, from Cicero, of the great cycle of the universe,
with its injunction to serve the common good, while the
dream itself shows the processes of natural regeneration
within a single year—processes explicitly invoked in
the concluding roundel celebrating the return of sum-
mer after winter.
The House of Fame is again a dream poem, told by a
narrator-dreamer named “Geffrey” and written, like The
Book of the Duchess, in octosyllabic couplets. The sub-
ject here is the nature of poetry, specifi cally the problem
of recording the great deeds of the past—the function
of narrative poetry—when the authorities who record
those deeds are fallible. The problem is epitomized in
the fi rst section by setting the Aeneid against Ovid’s
account of Dido from the Heroides. In the third part it
arises again in the form of quarrels among the various
authorities for the story of Troy and in the description
of Fame herself, whose apportionment of good or bad
reputation or oblivion is shown as utterly arbitrary. The
dreamer ends up in the house of Rumor, where truth
and lies are inextricably jumbled and where there are
no authoritative histories but only “tidynges” told by
shipmen and pilgrims. The poem breaks off unfi nished;
the occasion for its composition is unknown, but in some
ways it might be seen as foreshadowing the Canterbury
Tales, with its substitution of fallible pilgrim narrators
for an authoritative poet.
Troilus and Criseyde, of the mid-1380s, tells a story
regarded in the Middle Ages as historical, but Chaucer
constantly stresses the impossibility of establishing
truth. His main source, Boccaccio’s Filostrato, is never
mentioned (it is conceivable that he did not know who
wrote it); instead he invents an authority named Lollius,
to whom he appeals when he is in fact making up the
story. The spare plot—of how Criseyde abandons her
Trojan lover Troilus for the Greek Diomede—becomes
in Chaucer’s hands an elaborate work of over 8,000
lines, in poetry of an order unparalleled in earlier Eng-
lish, from its magnifi cent hymns to Love through the
easy colloquialisms of conversation to the eroticism of
the central book. The depth of thought in the poem re-
sults from Chaucer’s setting this story from the unalter-
able past in counterpoint to arguments from Boethius’sCHAUCER, GEOFFREY