ABSTRACT
Chaucer’s experimental lyric/narrative forms are merely one of a great variety of lyric innovations initiated by Geoffrey Chaucer’s genius. Indeed, one could redirect Dry den’s famous remark about the Canterbury Tales to Chaucer’s lyric poetry: truly, is God’s plenty. Though attributed to Chaucer in manuscripts, the authenticity of Womanly Noblesse and To Rosemounde has been debated. The stanza from Purse, on the other hand, contains again the kind of syntactic variety Chaucer utilized in his lyrics: there are four full stops, and the sense of line one runs over into line 2 to the end of the clause in the middle of the line. Structurally, as well, the lyrics relate in an important way to Chaucer’s other poetry. Chaucer perceived that the typical medieval lyric, as he knew it, was defective in that in its overriding conventionality it seemed to have worn itself out.
