ABSTRACT
Chaucer first and last was a narrative poet, narrative, that is to say, in the specific sense as distinct from epic and dramatic, which themselves belong to narrative in the generic sense. Chaucer was a deliberate literary artist, by which the authors mean that he wrote books, took what steps he could towards their preservation, would certainly have availed himself of the printing press if it had existed in his time, and speculated on their future reputation among readers. When he died, he had, in fact, set the main stream of poetry going on a very impressive tide. The first great English poem in point of time is The Canterbury Tales; the second is The Faerie Queen. It was written in the years round about 1580, when Edmund Spenser was in his early thirties and Shakespeare still a boy; roughly speaking, two hundred years after the composition of Chaucer's masterpiece.
