71. It was not until modern scholarship uncovered the secret of reading Middle English that we could understand that Chaucer, far from being a rude versifier, was a perfectly accomplished technician, and that his verse is rich in music and elegant to the highest degree. 72. Chaucer’s own e personality is a delight to encounter in his books. He is avowedly a bookworm, yet few poets observe nature with more freshness and delight. He is a of genial satire but can sympathize with true piety and goodness with as much pleasure as he attacks the hypocritical.
73. It is not an uncommon estimate of Chaucer that he must be counted among the few greatest of English poets. In range of interest he is surpassed only by Shakespeare. He was recognized already in the Renaissance, when it came to England, as the Father of English Poetry. He was a man of wide learning and wrote with ease on religion, philosophy, ethics, science, rhetoric.
No man has more completely summed up an age than Chaucer has his, yet the people of his great poems are revealed as men and women are in all times.
of verse, as Chaucer was, he introduced into English poetry many verse forms: the heroic couplet (in which form most of The Canterbury Tales is written), verse written in iambic pentameter, rhyming aa, bb, cc, etc. --a form that was to be very important in the eighth century. The rime royal, a seven-line stanza in iambic pentameters, rhyming ababbcc (Troilus and Criseyde). The terza rima, three-line stanzas, rhyming aba, bcb, cdc, etc. (which he imitated from Dante, in some of his minor poems). And the eight-line iambic pentameter stanza, rhyming ababbcbc(The Monk’s Tale).