Talk:Geoffrey Chaucer
From Academic Kids
I changed The Roman of the Rose to the Romance of the Rose, which is misleading but at least in a single language. I think that's the title used on most translations (both my copies are at the office). --MichaelTinkler
A "tenant" is someone who lives on somebody else's property. Chaucer isn't living in Poet's Corner, and I think the part he's using is probably his now. Would somebody please choose a better word for this? -- isis 31 Aug 2002
We should not forget the earliest extant original narrative we have by Chaucer, the dream vision called the "Book of the Duchess" (written before the "House of Fame" or the "Parliament of Fowls"). It fuses the genres of elegy and dream vision as never before (closest parallel being the theological allegory "Pearl"), and draws from the beginnings of several love visions by the French poets Machaut and Froissart, always setting the borrowed material in unexpected contexts, and deleting Love as the theme, thus setting up his own vision as a narrative description of the beginnings of Poetry -- maybe. Beware of those calling it derivative! Chaucer changes the whole ending of the story he borrows from Ovid's "Metamorphoses," and then uses its comedic potential to draw us uncritically into his siting of the origins of poetry in the Cave of Morpheus, the god of sleep. The poem's combination of beauty and oddity creates the inventive readers the rest of his poetry demands. Among the best of this poem's many imaginative readers are Wolfgang Clemen, Ellen E. Martin, A. C. Spearing. Wordsworth is indebted to it for some aspects of "Resolution and Independence" ("The Leech-Gatherer"), and Walter Scott alludes to it at length in his account of "The Antiquary." -- Jazzbojackson 06:11, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)
