Geoffrey Chaucer And His The Canterbury Tales

According to R.M. Lumiansky, a writer for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Chaucer’s birth date” was in the 1300s (Lumiansky, Britannica.com). The month and day that he was born in is unclear, and the unclearness of this information about his early life illustrated how dates were probably not recorded often in England. Geoffrey Chaucer was part of a typical, upper middle-class, English family at the time.

Chaucer held various jobs in the British government while he worked on his poetic works.

According to Tison Pugh in the book An Introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer, “Chaucer began a series of court positions” in his twenties (Pugh 3, eds.b.ebscohost.proxygsu-psao.galileo.usg.edu). He worked in international relations as well as the English judiciary during his career. Throughout his tenure as a powerful politician, Chaucer worked for the English government for decades. The importance of Chaucer’s roles in the government were that they ensured his stability, political power, and wealth. Furthermore, his career as a governmental official provided a counterbalance to his career as a writer, as most of the poems that he wrote were in his spare time.

The balance that Geoffrey Chaucer maintained between his political roles and the production of poems illustrated how he was a well-rounded individual because he managed his political tasks and poetic projects simultaneously.

During his lifetime, Chaucer composed renowned poems, and some examples of his works were The Canterbury Tales and The Book of the Duchess. However, most of the poems that preceded The Canterbury Tales were relatively obscure.

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The style of his poetry was long and followed a certain rhyme scheme. Chaucer’s poems were typically hundreds of pages.

People exalted Chaucer’s accomplishments in English literature after his death. The Poetry Foundation argued that the significance of the works of “Chaucer” spurred linguistic changes in Europe (“Geoffrey Chaucer,” poetryfoundation.org). Chaucer’s literary successors wrote their works in English as a result of the popularization of this language in British poetry. The famous authors that succeeded him were Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare; their works were written in English. Collectively, the prolificity of Chaucer’s poetic career as well as his usage of the English language influenced other British poets because they were inspired by his literary innovations. The authors that were successful in Britain after Chaucer’s time affected literature today; their successes showed how Geoffrey Chaucer was a pivotal figure in European history and literature.

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