Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) was the first major English poet. He was born in London, and probably attended the Saint Paul's Cathedral School in London. Geoffrey Chaucer was a page in the home of Prince Lionel son of King Edward III. During the Hundred Years War he served with the English army in from 1358 to 1360 and was captured and eventually ransomed. Between 1361 and 1366 he may have studied law at the Inns of Court in London England. Geoffrey Chaucer married Phillippa de Roet, whose sister, Catherine Swynford, married John of Gaunt, another son of King Edward III, as his third wife. Between 1360 and his death Geoffrey Chaucer held a number of official positions and traveled a great deal for diplomatic reasons, and therefore must have been an important man of affairs. He journeyed often to France for government business, and at least twice to Italy, where, it is believed, he was first introduced to the books of famous Italian writers Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio. Geoffrey Chaucer held the important and lucrative post of controller of the customs of wools, skins, and hides for England from 1374 to 1386, and lived during his posting to this position in a house above Aldgate, one of the gates to London. It is believed that he lived thereafter mainly in Kent, where he served as justice of the peace, and a member of Parliament. In 1389 he was appointed clerk of the King's works, which place him in charge of repair and construction of extensive Royal buildings. This position proved to be dangerous, because in a span of four days he was assaulted and robbed at least twice in 1390; he resigned the position in 1391. He was then appointed as deputy forester in North Petherton. Near the end of his life Geoffrey Chaucer apparently had the favor of King Richard II and King Henry IV, although it is believed that he suffered from financial troubles during this time.
The books Geoffrey Chaucer wrote prior to 1382 are dominated by prevailing literary mode common to the late Middle Ages, characterized by symbolic interaction between allegorical or fanciful persons who seem to live in a dream world, or cut off from reality. Most of these Middle Ages poems are composed in the Octosyllabic couplet common in early medieval narrative verse.
Geoffrey Chaucer's translation of Le Roman De la Rose, a popular 13Th century book, by French poets Guillaume de Lorris and Jean Clopinel, was probably written during this time prior to 1382. Among his other early books are The Book of the Duchess, a sensitive and evocative elegy in the form of dream vision, written in honor of Blanche, the first wife of John of Gaunt; the unfinished poem The House of Fame, a partly humorous, very fanciful dream vision in which Geoffrey Chaucer himself, in imitation of a more solemn scene in Dante's The Divine Comedy, is carried by a talkative eagle form the earth to a strange land; In The Parlement of Foules, also known as The Parliament of Birds, he is led in a dream into a garden, where he first enters a temple dedicated to goddess Venus and devoted apparently to romantic and sensual love, and then sees the judgement of Dame Nature in distributing mates to various birds representing various kinds of people. Part of the intention of Geoffrey Chaucer at this time was to portray love in marriage.

The books by Geoffrey Chaucer written in the later part of his life, generally depict solid individuals in the everyday world and contain some notable technical innovations in English Literature. During this time he made extensive use of rime royal stanza in his conservative, formal, or religious narratives, and he introduced the iambic pentameter couplet to English literature, using it in his satirical books.
Geoffrey Chaucer relies again on dream vision in The Legend of Good Women, but passes to the successive stories of famous women whose love was villainously betrayed by their men. Troilus and Cressida, a romance based in ancient Troy, displays simularities to another romance of the same subject by Giovanni Boccaccio. However, the book by Geoffrey Chaucer differs in representing sensitively the psychological stages of the noble but inconstant Cressida's love for and desertion of the warrior Troilus. The poem succeeds in relating these occurrences to a larger view of man's fate, partly through the reactions of the wise character Pandarus. The book Geoffrey Chaucer is most famous for is The Canterbury Tales which was written between 1386 and 1400. The Canterbury Tales comprises a series of extraordinarily diverse tales and viewpoints tied together by revelations of the characters of the tellers, a band of pilgrims. Geoffrey Chaucer exhibits in this book his mastery of story telling and his unique understanding of humanity. In addition to The Canterbury Tales and the other books previously described, he also authored shorter poems, and other books, of which some have been lost to time.

As a result of his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer is viewed as one of the greatest authors of English literature. The qualities that have endeared his books to generations of readers are his unique understanding of humanity, and his creation of loving and unique characters. Geoffrey Chaucer brought together in literary books of a new subtlety and urbanity the courtly and idealized view of life common to medieval romance, the spiritual insight common to medieval religious books, and the robust and lusty perception of human frailty common in medieval satire.
In Geoffrey Chaucer's time and the three prior centuries, French and Latin were the languages used by the upper classes in England. As a result, such classic books by Geoffrey Chaucer as The Canterbury Tales, The Parliament of Birds, and Troilus and Cressida were highly influential in establishing English as the common language of books in English literature. Following his death Geoffrey Chaucer was buried in Westminster Abbey, in what is known today as The Poets' Corner.





Geoffrey Chaucer leather bound books