The feature of Geoffrey Chaucer's (1340-1400) poetry that is most distinctive is not its content, says Duffell, but its form. First, Chaucer dared to compose in the newly respectable English rather than the conventional and established Latin and French. Chaucer played no small part in making English--and his East Midlands dialect of it--the language first of England, then of North America, and then of the world. Secondly, he says, Chaucer crafted verses that became the canonical forms of written poetry in English. His verse craft, unlike his social attitudes and his stories, was highly original: his longer line in particular had many features found in no other poet or language. He analyzes such aspects as design and instance, versifying in England, metrical stylistics, and the Scottish Chaucerians. Annotation ©2019 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Incorporating advances in historical linguistics but aimed at teachers and students of poetry, Chaucers Verse Art in its European Context argues that between 1378 and 1400 Geoffrey Chaucer used his knowledge of how poets versified in other languages to devise a meter that would be a perfect fit for the newly respectable English. While Chaucer and Gower are largely responsible for the last stage of this evolution in Middle English and Anglo-Norman, Chaucers risk in composing in English paid off and iambic pentameter and tetrameter endured to become the staples of English verse, while Gowers French stress-syllabic meters died with the Anglo-Norman dialect.
