![]() ![]() If Chaucer was not serious, Lionel Trilling wrote, “then Mozart is not serious and Molière is not serious and seriousness becomes a matter of pince-nez glasses and a sepia print of the Parthenon over the bookshelf.” That disagreement, like many another critical quarrel, ended up replacing one exaggeration with another-a new, dark-minded, always ironical Chaucer. Matthew Arnold said that Chaucer could not be ranked in the front line of English poets, because he lacked “high seriousness.” Later commentators objected bitterly to this. ![]() They felt that the formula invited condescension, and it did. Eventually, however, some critics wearied of this sun-kissed Chaucer. “As I read / I hear the crowing cock.” Others have compared his writings to the tapestries that were being produced in Europe during his lifetime, with the quail and the rabbits scooting through the underbrush. “He is the poet of the dawn,” Longfellow wrote. The received wisdom on Geoffrey Chaucer is that he was the freshest, clearest, and sweetest of the great English poets-which makes sense, since, living in the fourteenth century, he was also the first great English poet. ![]() Chaucer’s poem began the glorious tradition of English realism. ![]()
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