ABSTRACT
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was agreed that Geoffrey Chaucer was a master of poetic language—whether that language was seen as appropriate ‘augmentation’ of a needy vernacular, or as itself a ‘well of English vndefyled’, language in an imagined original purity. Geoffrey Chaucer’s high reputation has never been seriously in doubt: but it is a curious fact that the nature of his poetic achievement remains an open question. One of the contributors to a critical symposium takes as ‘the most common denominator in Chaucer’s literary personality a certain air of insouciance’. ‘He seems’, the critic continues, ‘perpetually to be conducting a conversation with friends.’ The fact that much of Chaucer’s knowledge of the art was indirect may encourage us to respect the freedom and variety of his practice. Indeed, as one writer has convincingly shown, ‘Chaucer’s use of certain “rhetorical” terms merely indicates a generalised knowledge rather than a technical acquaintance with it’.
