ABSTRACT
Chaucer's major poems are usually read primarily for their stories and only secondarily, if at all, for their poetry. Critics in this century have rightly been fascinated by long-standing problems that arise from his methods of narration. ''At all times," Stephen Knight wrote in 1973, Chaucer "has been recognized as a fine storyteller and a master of description. The remarkable thing about all these views of Chaucer is that they could be just as valid ifhe had written in prose: very little criticism treats him as a man working with the special methods and the special powers of the poet" (Knight 1973, vii). In 1987 Robert M.Jordan pointed out again that "interpretive criticism of T7ze Canterbury Tales has tended to overlook the primacy of the medium as Chaucer's instrument of poetic expression" (Jordan 1987, 57). This situation continues today, as Derek Pearsall has pointed out with some acerbity: "Though it might easily slip one's mind, given that nine-tenths of the critical writing on Chaucer never mentions the fact, Chaucer's poetry is written in verse, and the way we read that verse and respond to its musicality, whether in our heads or when reading aloud, is presumably an important part of our reading of and response to its meaning" (Pearsall 1991, 41).
