Chaucer's Early Poetry.
Chaucer Frühe Dichtung.

Description: Examines how Chaucer's early poems (i.e., those written before 1380) engage the conventional forms, techniques, and themes of French and Italian models, enriching them via "humour and realism" and applying them to "new uses." His innovative "juxtapositions and sequences" reflect both his "poetic temperament" and a "transitional period" in literary history. In BD he makes the "style and form of French poetry come alive within his English idiom," combining dream vision, elegy, and dramatic conversation in a "novel" combination of "heterogeneous elements." The "humour and irony" of HF results from his experiments with an unexpected narrative persona, stylistic variety, wry uses of source material, and startling juxtapositions and reversals, remaking the traditional "allegorical journey," PF is a "conscious work of art" that explores aspects of the allegorical mode (personification, allegoresis, beast fable, etc.) and submits its themes and techniques to genial satire. In various ways, ABC, Pity, Lady, Mars, and Anel also illustrate Chaucer's attraction—and resistance—to poetic traditions. Adapted and expanded from the author's 1938 "Der Junge Chaucer," and published simultaneously in German and English.

Chaucer Subjects: Book of the Duchess
House of Fame
Parliament of Fowls
ABC
The Complaint unto Pity
A Complaint to His Lady
The Complaint of Mars
Anelida and Arcite