Chaucer and French Poetry
- Author / Editor
- Wimsatt, J[ames] I.
Chaucer and French Poetry
- Published
- Derek Brewer, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer. Writers and their Background (London: G. Bell, 1974), pp. 109-36.
- Description
- Explains why Eustace Deschamps considered Chaucer to be the "grant translateur" of French into English by detailing the general and specific ways in which Chaucer imitated and emulated three of his French predecessors. As the "archetype" of the love poet, Guillaume de Lorris established a number of conventions of love poetry: narrator-lover, dreams, garden, exempla, complaint, and love discourse. Mediating many of de Lorris's conventions for Chaucer, Guillaume de Machaut also provided models for his metrical forms, his comic personae, and a number of specific passages. Jean de Mean provided models for several of Chaucer's major characters (Pandarus, Wife of Bath, Pardoner, etc.) and prompted his encyclopedic portrayal of love.
- Alternative Title
- Geoffrey Chaucer. Writers and their Background.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations