Chaucer : Geoffrey (c.1342/43-1400), his Canterbury Tales made him the most important English poet before Shakespeare.
... g example is Geoffrey Chaucer, the so-called Father of English Poetry. The adjective "outstanding" is very apt, for his mind stands out rather than in. The designation "Father of English Poetry" is perhaps less apt. Not because there is any poet of considerable stature preceding him, but some critics Page 366 protest that by using this phrase we make Chaucer look as if he were responsible... Shakespeare who was the literary father of Hamlet and Macbeth and Falstaff and Romeo. So when Chaucer is described as the Father of English Poetry he may be thought to be anything except English Poetry itself. This is declared to be an erroneous suggestion. If the usual designation has to be applied, then Chaucer was a part of what he made: the first child he had was his own self or, let us say, the born... English poetic genius except for just two who overpass the maker of it: Shakespeare and Milton. Sri Aurobindo, when he wrote The Future Poetry, did not hold Chaucer in very high regard: he was of one mind with Matthew Arnold who found Chaucer lacking in what he called "high seriousness" as well as the "grand style". Only in a few phrases here and there did Matthew Arnold see these properties of what ...
... this poetry as it emerges in Chaucer strikes at once an English note. The motive is a direct and concrete poetic observation of ordinary human life and character. There is no preoccupying idea, no ulterior design; life, the external figure and surface of things is reflected as near as possible to its native form in the individual mind and temperament of the poet. Chaucer has his eye fixed on the object... The Future Poetry Chapter IX The Course of English Poetry - I Chaucer and the Poetry of External Life The spirit and temper that have stood behind the creative force and come to the front in a literature are the one essential thing that we must discern, for it is these that predestine the course the poetry of a people will take and the turn it gives... utterance of profounder truth and the right magic of a speech and rhythm which will be the apt body and motion of its spirit. The first definite starting-point of this long movement is the poetry of Chaucer. Then first the rough poverty of the Anglo-Saxon mind succeeded in assimilating the French influence and refined and clarified by it its own rude speech and crude aesthetic sense. It is characteristic ...
... customs and figures of Chaucer's time may have fallen into obsolescence, the main stuff of his creation still corresponds to life's play around us, and that is why Spenser is as good as forgotten, while Chaucer with his generally less poetic temper persists. But to the true lover of poetry who is not altogether lost in the whirlpools of the life-force the "Faerie Queene" must always remain delightful despite... its total coinage of fancy there need be no prejudice in its favour to prevent its very unequal intensity from being acknowledged no less than the limitations of its creative range. Words such as Chaucer puts in the mouth of an old beggar — Page 9 And on the ground, which is my modres gate, I knock è with my staff, erlich and late, And sa to hire, "Leve, modre,... revealed we do not encounter in his work; and for the simple reason that his poetic excellence is for the most part divorced from personal emotion. On the whole, however, he is more often great than Chaucer. Except for the Prologue and the episode of the Christian child slain in the ghetto there is not much in the "Canterbury Tales" about which we can feel that the metrical swing and the chime of rhyme ...
... approximately determined if a definite date can be ascribed to any point in its known history. From a knowledge of modern English alone, a student of language can easily hazard the statement that Chaucer could not have lived as early as A.D. 1000. For he knows not only that the language is continually changing, but also its approximate rate of change. The language of Bernard Shaw is evidently not... and vulgar bhāsā-forxm, on the other. Now, the difference between Pānini's language and the language of the Rg-Veda is certainly not greater than that between, say, the forms of English used by Chaucer and Bernard Shaw. The conclusion is justified therefore that, whatever the date of the contents of the Rg-Veda, its language can by no means be dated much earlier than 1000 B.C." 2 As for those... from that of the Gāthās as Old High German from the language of Ulfila's Gothic Bible. Nor, because the amount of linguistic change between the Rigveda and Pānini is not greater than that between Chaucer and Bernard Shaw, can we mechanically extrapolate to the former the 600 years of the latter. "Languages," says the philologist Simeon Potter, "change at different speeds, and English has certainly ...
... several individual estimates, each with its own percipience, crystalline phrasing and air of judicial finality, but one or two at least deserve to be sampled here. Thus, for example, about Chaucer: Chaucer has his eye fixed on the object, and that object is the external action of life as it passes before him throwing its figures on his mind and stirring it to a kindly satisfaction in the... soul-values through the facade of material actualities. Having thus brilliantly surveyed the broad spans and the luminous crests in the course of English poetry from the Anglo-Saxons and Chaucer to Whitman and Yeats, Sri Aurobindo turns to the probabilities of the future. "We can see where we stand today," he says, "but we cannot tell where we shall stand a quarter of a century hence." 16 ...
... taking the work of Chaucer or of subsequent poets almost at their best and of Shakespeare at a quite ordinary level and feeling the effect on the poetic listener in our own intuitive being." Sri Aurobindo takes Chaucer's line - Page 8 He was a verray parfit gentil knight - to which for completer comparison with Shakespeare we may add from Chaucer the three other lines... about that knight's noble deeds: At mortal batailles hadde he bene fiftene And foughten for our faith at Tramissene In listes thryes, and ay slain his fo... Now pass from "Chaucer with his easy adequate limpidity" to "Shakespeare's rapid seizing of the intuitive inevitable word and the disclosing turn of phrase which admits us at once to a direct vision of the thing he shows ...
... there would be a boldly forcible or a well-beaten energy of speech and much of the more metallic vigours of verse. This side of the national mind would prepare us for English poetry as it was until Chaucer and beyond, for the ground-type of the Elizabethan drama, the work of Dryden and Pope, the whole mass of eighteenth-century verse, Cowper, Scott, Wordsworth in his more outward moments, Byron without... the spirit of English poetry are extreme and violent, astonishing in their decisiveness and abruptness. We can mark off first the early English poetry which found its solitary greater expression in Chaucer; indeed it marks itself off by an absolute exhaustion and cessation, a dull and black Nirvana. The magnificent Elizabethan outburst has another motive, spirit and manner of expression which seem to ...
... produces it out of itself, so that we may consider the life-instinct the central thing in the Englishman. You must have recognised in the two elements the face of Chaucer and the face of Shakespeare and realised that Shakespeare can take up Chaucer into himself and serve as the one sufficient face. The life-instinct can even lose itself in externalities as it does often enough in much of Elizabethan drama ...
... considered. He has not their high and active intelligence nor their unremitting "high seriousness". He has a certain comedic or realistic vein which links him to Chaucer who also is a poet of outward character and act. There is the comic relief of "things like the burlesque life on Olympus, or Irus the beggar, or Ajax slipping... story. Thersites is speedily silenced; the swineherd of Odysseus remains 'the god-like swineherd', himself a king's son". 27 More important still, Homer, unlike Chaucer, is no observer of external life "without any preoccupying idea, without any ulterior design, simply as it reflects itself in the individual mind and temperament ...
... Chatterji, Bankim Chandra, 15, 16, 19, 27, 49, 50, 58ff, 184,194, 219-20, 228, 235, 280, 281, 321, 514 Chatterji, N.C., 730-1 Chattopadhyaya, Harindranath, 511 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 613,616 Chaudhuri, Haridas, 751, 752 Chaudhari, Nirad C., 450 Chidanandam, Veluri, 531fn, 544,546fh Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 78 Chirol,... Fry, Christopher, 147 Fuller, Sir Bamfylde, 204, 224, 248 Future Poetry, The, 404,448,511,610ff; the mantra, 610-1, 612; the poetic word, 611; the poet as seer, 611-2; on Chaucer, 613; on the Elizabethans, 613-4; on Paradise Lost, 614; on Byron and Wordsworth, 614-5; on Homer and Whitman, 615; five powers of poetry, 616; Sun of Poetic Truth, 617ff; form and verbal expression ...
... Browning to shreds for setting up what may be called a religious cult of sexual love instead of looking at things as Chaucer did in a purely physical and animal-human light. Huxley says that to idealise and romanticise sex is to put an extra barrage in the way of true mysticism. Chaucer had nothing save his appetites between himself and God, while Browning, it is argued, had not only his appetites ...
... word of the intuition almost unexampled in any poetry. The difference can be measured by taking the work of Chaucer or of subsequent poets almost at their best and of Shakespeare at a quite ordinary level and feeling the effect on the poetic listener in our own intuitive being. We take Chaucer with his easy adequate limpidity,— He was a very parfit gentle knight, and then pass on to Shakespeare's ...
... principle of quantitative metre,—what was done was to bring in classical metres built according to the laws of quantity proper to a classical tongue but of doubtful validity in a modern language. Chaucer, influenced by mediaeval French and Italian poetry, had naturalised their metrical inventions by making accentual pitch and inflexion the basis of English metre. This revolution succeeded because he... Greek and Latin tongues—an achievement far surpassing anything done in the mediaeval Romance languages—and a desire arose to bring this greatness of structure and achievement into English poetry. As Chaucer by the success of the accentual structure in verse and his discovery of its true and natural rhythm was able to bring in the grace and fluidity of the Romance tongues, so they too Page 318 ...
... rebellious 'modernism' blew winds of radical change over it. English Page 51 poetry is a field of adventure, with abrupt starts and turns, as it were, from the homely and sunny work of Chaucer to the opulent exquisiteness of Spenser and the multi-toned passion of Shakespeare, from the Elizabethan period to the time of the Metaphysicals with their scholarly or mystic exercise of wit and on... latter by the former in one period and vice versa in the next and at the same time the shooting up of either here and there amidst the predominance of its opposite. Thus the usually down-to-earth Chaucer with his tempered lucid manner can amaze us Page 52 now and again with, as Arnold noticed, 'the grand style' - O martyr souded to virginity - or with the imaginative felicity ...
... Ballads and Romances of the West. But since the advent of Chaucer in English literature, the day we heard him say about his dearest Italian poet Petrarch "Whose rethorike swete" Enlumynd all Ytaille of Poetrie, what a new life and novel tune has appeared in English poetry, what a unique resplendence has illumined its firmament! Chaucer elevated English literature as from a mundane to the spiritual ...
... 1768-9 contributions to London magazines. 1768 attempt to get Dodsley to publish especially Ella. 1769 attempt to interest Horace Walpole. 1770 life in London & death. 3) Speght's Glossary to Chaucer. Kersey's Dictionary. metres not 15ṭḥ century; rhymes inconsistent with 15ṭḥ century pronunciation; words either noted down from above & often incorrectly used; or invented by C. himself. Page ...
... by a deeper delight in the power of vision of the soul and spirit. The high energy of English poetry has done great and interesting things; it has portrayed life with charm and poetic interest in Chaucer, made thought and character and action and passion wonderful to the life soul in us in Shakespeare, seen and spoken with nobility and grandeur of vision and voice in Milton, intellectualised vigorous ...
... abroad nowadays in all the arts, but I doubt whether any English or French critic or prosodist would go so far as to dub "Who killed Cock Robin?" the true movement of English rhythm, putting aside Chaucer, Spenser, Pope or Shelley as too cultivated and accomplished or too much under foreign influence or to seek for his models in popular songs or the products of the café chantant in preference to Hugo ...
... aiding it have alone successfully dominated English verse-form; intrinsic quantity has been left to do what it can for itself under their rule. The basis commonly adopted in most English poetry since Chaucer is the accentual rhythm, the flow of accentual pitch and inflexion which is so all-important an element in the intonation of English speech. In any common form of English poetry we find all based on ...
... his vision, of his speech, of his feeling, by his rendering of the world within or the world without or of any world to which he has access. It may be the outer world that he portrays like Homer and Chaucer or a vivid life-world like Shakespeare or an inmost world of experience like Blake or other mystic poets. The recognition of that power will come first from the few who recognise good poetry when they ...
... Poetry would not be written from the usual sources of the world's literature—the levels of consciousness which, according to Sri Aurobindo, may be classified: subtle-physical mind (as in Homer and Chaucer, where the inner imaginative response is mostly to external gesture, movement and action); vital mind (as in Kalidasa and Shakespeare, where the vibrant play, delicate or vehement, of sensation, passion ...
... there is no special movement of rhetoric, there is no special inwardness of expression. But something is said smoothly, beautifully, with some kind of general light in it. The blithe sunshiny style of Chaucer, for instance. That is the adequate style. Then you have the effective style when something is said with force, a passion comes in and becomes quite prominent, rhetorical effects are there — not n ...
... That the essential note of the new Romanticism was not of the creative Life-force but of the creative Intelligence can easily be marked if, just as we put Shakespeare face to face with Milton or Chaucer or Bacon, we compare certain lines from the supreme Elizabethan to those of the most outstanding later poets. Harken to Shakespeare talking of passing away from the turmoil of human life - a verse ...
... the colour of an Page 59 intuition of the life-soul and is conveyed to our minds in-tensely through our nerves of mental sensation. Compare these closing lines to those verses of Chaucer: What is this life? What asketh man to have, Now with his love, now in his colde grave, Alone, withouten any companye? In this phrase, which is one of Chaucer's rare moments of great ...
... observation. He is speaking of the kind of poetry he calls "adequate" or "effective", and he points beyond it to a finer grade of poetic style. He regards even that grade — which can be exemplified from Chaucer, Milton, Shelley, Keats — as still not the ultimate. Sri Aurobindo is writing from a comparative vision. That is my first contention. The second is that when he further talks of Browning's "robust ...
... needed, sweep and grandeur are aimed at, we can dispense with it, provided we substitute this loss by other technical devices like enjambement, verse-paragraph, stress-modulation and inflexion. Chaucer and Spenser, prior to Milton, had retained rhyme, obviously because they had not outgrown the French influence. Also the language had not grown virile enough for the load of blank verse. It is not ...
... When Dante presents the great figures of that world he gives them a gravity and nobility which strike a new note in Mediaeval literature. This note is absent in the rest of Europe even after Dante. Chaucer, for instance, was versed not only in Dante and Petrarch but also in Virgil. Yet except on rare occasions he has not absorbed anything of the majesty of the Virgilian word. Thus, as a critic has pointed ...
... 11. Relation between the Achaemenid Inscriptions and the Avesta 90 Relation between the Avesta and the Rigveda 90 Relation between modern English and Chaucer 90-91 Relation between Pānini's Sanskrit and the Rigveda 91 Different rates of language-change - even between neighbouring countries 91-92 ...
... vision, of his speech, of his feeling, by his rendering of the world within or the world without or of any world to which he has access. It may be the outer world that he portrays like Homer and Chaucer or a vivid life-world like Sakespeare or an inmost world of experience like Blake or other mystic poets. The recognition of that power will come first from the few who recognise good poetry when ...
... nowadays in all the arts, but I doubt whether any English or French critic or prosodist would go so far as to turn to "Who killed Cock Robin?" for the true movement of English rhythm, putting aside Chaucer, Spenser, Pope or ____________________ 1. "Never does anyone who practises good come to woe" (Gita, 6.40). Page 307 Shelley as too cultivated and accomplished or too much ...
... undeveloped or quite rustic before Shakespeare, although the image of the grandly real, something truly familiar and intimate that Shakespeare evokes in the heart of foreigners is not given by Spencer, Chaucer or even Marlowe. Shakespeare has revealed something of the universal in the very special style he created – here was a diversity, a plasticity, a suggestiveness, a magic all its own. There is some ...
... and living inspiration. The fountain has to be dug deep and the revivifying waters released. It is a simple truth that we state and it is precisely this that we have missed in the present age. Chaucer created a new poetic world, Shakespeare created another, Milton yet a third, the Romantics – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron – each of them has a whole world to his credit. But this ...
... attention to them. Page 47 His personal library thus came to include some of the latest books in English, French, German, Latin, Greek — and of course all the major English poets from Chaucer to Swinburne. A cousin of Sri Aurobindo's, Basanti Devi, has given us this amusing account of his addiction to books and his habit of carrying trunkloads of them wherever he went: Auro Dada used ...
... in many fields of activity: teaching, scholarship, political journalism, poetry, Yoga. He dieted on the poets of the West and India, and his library had all the great English poets from Geoffrey Chaucer to Algernon Charles Swinburne. His Bengali tutor, speaking of the 1898-9 period, has recorded that among the English poems on which Sri Aurobindo was then engaged there was one on Savitri also. And ...
... Charu-Da — Bhater (Charu Chandra Deb Sarkar) Who will pray, he must fast and be clean And fat his soul, and make his body lean. Chaucer, the Summoner’s Tale I could see his lean body, it couldn’t be leaner. But his soul was beyond my ken. Let’s hold judgment till later (if one can judge). Who is this, another Charu Chandra ...
... am not very rich in the faculty of image-making. And without that hardly any creation worth the name is possible. Sri Aurobindo: What is this superstition? At that rate Sophocles, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth are not good poets because their poetry is not full of images? Is Kalidasa a greater poet than Vyas or Valmiki because he is full of images? Then on April 1st he ...
... into his high language and rhythm and been fused in his personality into something wonderfully strong and rich and beautiful. Sug- Page 114 gestions and secrets have been caught from Chaucer, Peele, Spenser, Shakespeare, and their hints have given a strange grace to a style whose austerity of power has been nourished by great classical influences; Virgilian beauty and majesty, Lucretian ...
... India, 118 Cerebrals, 28, 29 Chadwick, John, 49 Chaemhet, tomb of, 73 Chakravarty, F., 37 Chandra, Moti, 87 Chanhu-dāro, 97 Chatterji, S.K., 11, 20, 21 Chaucer, 90, 91 Chenab, 126 Childe, Gordon, 33, 54, 73, 74 Chumuri, 110 Cleator, P.E., 49fn., 92 Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages, 30 Copper hoards ...
... influences wove themselves together into his high language and rhythm and were fused in his personality into something wonderfully strong, rich and beautiful. Suggestions and secrets were caught from Chaucer, Peele, Spenser, Shakespeare, and their hints gave a strange grace to a style whose austerity of power had been nourished by great classical influences. A touch of Virgilian beauty and majesty, a poise ...
... material consciousness as did the heroes of Homer. The Rishis were the mystics of the time and took the frame of their symbolic imagery from the material life around them. 20 October 1936 Homer and Chaucer are poets of the physical consciousness—I have pointed that out in The Future Poetry . 31 May 1937 You can't drive a sharp line between the subtle physical and the physical like that in these ...
... subjective, or with a certain, often a great but indefinite soul-power bearing up its movement of word and rhythm. It varies in intensity: for the lower intensity we can get plenty of examples from Chaucer, when he is indulging his imagination rather than his observation, and at a higher pitch from Spenser; for the loftier intensity we can cite at will for one kind from Milton's early poetry, for another ...
... depends on power of thought, feeling, language—not on abundance of images. Some poets are rich in images, all need not be. 18 February 1936 What is this superstition? At that rate Sophocles, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth are not good poets, because their poetry is not Page 165 full of images? Is Kalidasa a greater poet than Vyasa or Valmiki because he is fuller of images? 18 February ...
... time in his highly imagined and deeply felt Adonais? Or look at Shelley's adoption of the still older terza rima of Dante for his Triumph of Life. Talking of subject, can we rightly disapprove of Chaucer or Shakespeare writing of Troilus and Cressida or Keats choosing to write of the fall of Hyperion or, on a smaller though not poetically inferior scale, Stephen Phillips conjuring up the story of Marpessa ...
... abundance of its spontaneity and skill lying still un-published in the desk of the Yogi indifferent to fame. Even that little, however, is enough to make us repeat Dryden's famous eulogium of Chaucer: "Here is God's plenty." And the expression takes on a special hue of meaning when we turn to another class of poems from his pen, which are devoted to embodying a more explicitly spiritual oudook ...
... need not be. It seems I am not very rich in the faculty of imagination. And without that hardly any creation worth the name is possible. What is this superstition? At that rate Sophocles, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth are not good poets, because their poetry is not full of images? Is Kalidasa a greater poet than Vyas or Valmiki because he is fuller of images? After what you have seen of my ...
... Review, the, 336n., 339n Camoens, 197 Canada, 106 Cato, 239 Chaitanya,216 Chaldea, 219, 223 Chamberlaine, Neville, 100 Chandragupta, 93, 394 Chaucer, 194 China, 119, 238-40, 242 Christ, 6, 50, 14511., 151, 154, 164, 195, 208,213-14,259,273-4,381,384 Christianity, 23, 58, 151, 168, 213, 280,282,359 Churchill, Winston ...
... seems I am not very rich in the faculty of image-making. And without that hardly any creation worth the name is possible. SRI AUROBINDO: What is this superstition? At that rate Sophocles, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth are not good poets because their poetry is not full of images? Is Kalidasa a greater poet than Vyas or Valmiki because he is full of images? Then on April 1st he wrote ...
... It seems I am not very rich in the faculty of imagination. And without that hardly any creation worth the name is possible. SRI AUROBINDO: What is this superstition? At that rate Sophocles, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth are not good poets because their poetry is not full of images? Is Kalidasa a greater poet than Vyas or Valmiki because he is fuller of images? MYSELF: What thinkest ...
... there were heaps of books on various subjects in different languages - French, German, Russian, English, Greek, Latin etc., about which I knew nothing. The poetical works of all English poets from Chaucer to Swinburne were also there. Countless English novels were stacked in his book-cases, littered in the comers of his rooms, and stuffed in his steel trunks. The Iliad of Homer, the Divine Comedy ...
... Overton 305 Carpenter, Edward 438 Cassirer, Ernest 267 Chadwick,J.A.32 Chandidas 45 Chatterjec, Bankim Chandra 9 Chaucer, Geoffrey 9 Chetty, Shanker 14 Chitrangada 363,458 Clark, A.B. 9 Clemens, Prudentius 336 Clough, Arthur Hugh 53 Cocteaujean 268 ...
... there was no happiness or delight in it. D. K. found books coming by railway parcels. He saw French, German, Latin, Greek, even Russian books on Sri Aurobindo's shelf. He saw all the poets from Chaucer to Swinburne in his library. Page 46 But he was immensely surprised to find that in spite of his prolonged residence in England there was no trace of a deep European influence ...
... his contrast -of Othello's (p. 33) Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul, But I do love thee! And when I love thee not, Chaos is come again. (3.3. 90-92) with Chaucer's Troilus's lines to Cressida who has actually broken faith with him. Through which I see that clene out of your minde Ye hen me cast, and Ine can nor may, Page 105 ...
... the planes beyond it. We have already had a taste of the Miltonic version of "the poetic intelligence" as well as obtained a glimpse of Dryden's exercise of the same poetic agency in dealing with Chaucer's lines on life. While Milton, compared with Shakespeare in two of his splendid bursts of the vital mind, fared very well in his own domain, Dryden came a bit of a cropper, rhetorically artificialising ...
... widening of consciousness," there is no evidence in his poetry that he had a vision of the supramental Consciousness. The world of Romantic poets is a psychic world, deeper than it was Chaucer's or even Shakespear's, a realisation of the psychic life deeper than the merely emotional. Sri Aurobindo's is still deeper, and higher and wider: it is spiritual. The Romantic hears the throb of ...
... by very great ones, and most legitimately too so long as one either improves the matter adopted or clothes it in a novel hue and harmony. Virgil's quarrying from Homer is well-known, so also are Chaucer's beautiful imitation of the Italians and Milton's recutting the gems he discovered in the splendour of the Classics. Wordsworth's finely intonated Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed ...
... least free from "blurred sentiments" - Mr. Lai's bête noire in relation to that notorious quotation of his from Savitri. And, of course, most free is the locus classicus of rain-stirring: Chaucer's vision of the pilgrimage to Canterbury When that Aprille with his shoures sote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote. But we can hardly assert the same of Mr. Lai's ...
... at least free from "blurred sentiments"— Mr. Lal's bite noire in relation to that notorious quotation of his from Savitri. And, of course, most free is the locus classions of rain-stirring: Chaucer's vision of the pilgrimage to Canterbury When that Aprille with his shoures sote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote. Page 445 But we can hardly assert the same ...
... you consult the OED you will find among the very first significances of "shroud": "vesture in which the world or the things of Page 159 nature are clothed." An illustration is in Chaucer's Romance of the Rose, 64: And then bicometh the ground so proud That it wol have a newe shroud. Obviously, what Chadwick's "meadow" is clothed in and what makes it "green" thereby is ...
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