英国文学入门.docVIP

The Introduction of Geoffrey Chaucer From 1066 onwards, the language is known to scholars as Middle English. Ideas and themes from French and Celtic literature appear in English writing at about this time, but the first great name in English literature is that of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) who was an English author, poet, philosopher, bureaucrat , and diplomat.Chaucer introduces the iambic pentameter line, the rhyming couplet and other rhymes used in Italian poetry . Some of Chaucers work is prose and some is lyric poetry, but his greatest work is mostly narrative poetry, which we find in The Canterbury Tales. As an author, he is considered as “the father of English poetry”. Chaucers writings validated English as a language capable of poetic greatness, and in the process instituted many of the traditions of English poesy that have continued to this day. He was also, for a writer of his times, capable of powerful psychological insight. Ezra Pound famously wrote that, although Shakespeare is often considered the great psychologist of English verse, Don Geoffrey taught him everything he knew. Chaucer was born around 1343. His father and grandfather were both London wine merchants and before that, for several generations, the family had been merchants in Ipswich. Although the Chaucer’s were not of noble birth, they were extremely well-to-do. The Canterbury Tales Chaucer is almost certainly best known for his long poem, The Canterbury Tales. The poem consists of a collection of fourteen stories, two in prose and the rest in verse. The tales, some of which are original, are contained inside a frame tale told by a group of pilgrims on their way from Southwark to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas à Beckets at Canterbury Cathedral. The poem is in stark contrast to other literature of the period in the naturalism of its narrative and the variety of the pilgrims and the stories they tell, setting it apart from almost anything else written during this period. Th