ABSTRACT
Chaucer wrote poems of the kind he disowned in the Retractions as ‘worldly vanitees’ throughout his working life, if we can judge from our scanty information about the dates of composition of ‘many a song and many a leccherous lay’. Urbanity, it is true, is to be found everywhere in Chaucer’s writing, but we can see it most clearly evolving as a new poetic technique in the group of poems which have as their raison detre the need to communicate directly with a clearly defined and known audience of a well-bred and sophisticated type. Some understanding of the moral and philosophical themes pursued with such urbanity in the short poems, and of their background, is, therefore, of great importance to our understanding of the major works. The Complaint of Mars is not a great poem – the very fact that its speakers seem only thin disguises for the poet himself no doubt tells against it.
