Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Chaucer And His School A. Geoffrey Chaucer (? 1340-1400) I. Foreign Influences Chaucer pre-eminently an English poet; but susceptible to the attractive parts of French and Italian literature; these foreign influences not exotic, but, ultimately incorporated inseparably into his native genius, served to bring out the best of his gifts, and did not misdirect them; whatever he borrowed, except in his experimental stage, he made his own. (a) France: Chaucer used most the courtly allegory, the beast fable, the fabliau; could not catch the spirit of the lyrics; had no sympathy with the romances, then past their zenith. In allegory, Le Roman de la Rose was the master-type; the work of the two poets Gulllaume de Lorrls (c, 1230) and Jean de Meun (c. 1270); the first part, a complex allegory of love, courtly, chivalrous, prolix, elaborately descriptive, left unfinished; the second part, satirical, coarse, witty, as if designed to throw the whole scheme into ridicule; Chaucer as a young poet most influenced by Guillaume, later by the more realistic Jean; his translation lost; but its effect on him obvious in all his early poems. The beast fable culminated in the Roman du Renart, a French version of the cycle of stories concerning Reynard the Fox; humorous; satirical; realistic pictures of life and character (The Nonnes Prestes Tale). The fabliau provided stories of everyday life; often coarse, often clever, often skilful narrative (The Reves Tale). (b) Italy: Here appeared the greatest poet of mediseval Europe?Dante Allghlerl (1265-1322) author of the Divina Corn- media, a pilgrimage through Hell and Purgatory into Paradise; great in style, in thought, in passion, in poetry, in humanity; the apotheosis of mediseval Catholicism; pillory of all imp…
