8/16/2019 Chaucer as a Father of English Poetry

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Chaucer as a Father of English Poetry

Dryden has described as the “Father of English Poetry” and he richly deserve

this title. Indeed, Chaucer is the “Father of English Poetry” because he created that

literary form of the English language which, in all essential features, remains upto the present day, the accepted from of literary English. He found English dry, uncouth brick

 but left it marble-beautiful and full of liquid luster. He found it a dialect and made it

Standard English. He taught this fellow speaking countrymen “The Secret upon which

depended the future of English versification”. With him “Said Mathew Arnold, is

 born our real poetry”. In fact, Chaucer came as a breath of fresh air and transformed

English poetry which was crude, imperfect and in an infantile state.

Chaucer made beauty and melody the guiding principles of his work, and became

the pioneer of the metrical principles which have survived in English poetry to this day.

By the magic of his touch he raised a dialect into language. He made the English

language a first rate literary medium. In an age when English poetry needed invigoration

he gave it new life and showed it fresh path.

As Chaucer is the last of medieval, he is the first of the moderns. His importance

in the development of English literature is very great because he removed poetry from the

mirror upto nature.

With Chaucer the English language and English literature grew up. He has the

metrical craftsmanship to handle English with a subtlety, a flexibility and a polish which

made it at one the equal, as a literary language of French or Italian. He has the European

consciousness, too, to enable him to render in English the dominant themes and attitudes

of European literature and at the same time the English national consciousness to allow

him to present the English scene as it has never been presented before.

The critics on Chaucerian poetry are almost unanimous in their verdict that he was

not merely a poet of Medieval times but a poet of all the times and that he certainly

stands on the thresholds of the New age. He was the pioneer of real and genuine type of

English Poetry. G.K. Chesterton aptly observes: There was never a man who was more

of a Maker than Chaucer. He made a national language for so great a nation. Shakespeareand Milton were the greatest sons of their country, but Chaucer was the Father of his

country.