ABSTRACT
Chaucer's short poems proper, though numbering fewer than twenty, reveal a unique lyric imagination embodied in the specific genres and forms in which they are written as well as the personal, political, and social situations for which they were composed. The inherent interest of Chaucer's lyric corpus notwithstanding, what is most surprising about his short poems is the remarkable narrowing of the formal, generic, and institutional spectrum of medieval lyric possibility they collectively represent. Most of the scholarship produced on Chaucer's short poems in this age of historicism has been topical, concerned with uncovering the social, political, and ideological resonances of specific lyrics within Chaucer's Ricardian milieu. Those who come to Chaucer's short poems possessing any familiarity with this vernacular tradition will find his lyric corpus greatly limited in form, structure, metrics, mode, and theme by comparison to the hundreds of Middle English lyrics that survive from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
