Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer served English kings as diplomat and civil servant and wrote poetry in the vernacular for a courtly and urban audience. The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde show him as a poet who reports what others say and follows his sources. Pilgrims of every estate speak. The narrator claims no prophetic authority. Instruction comes by encounter, by ranging from saint's life to fabliau without forcing a single moral frame. Where Dante claims illuminated power for the poet, Chaucer declines the claim. The poem works by recognition across the whole range of social experience.