Geoffrey Chaucer's Poetry

Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry includes dream visions, courtly narrative, and the varied storytelling of The Canterbury Tales. A pilgrimage provides the latter work with a setting in which people of different occupations and temperaments tell stories and respond to one another. Troilus and Criseyde gives love, loyalty, and changing fortune an extended narrative form, while dream poems explore grief, reputation, and other concerns through imagined encounters. Chaucer’s verse moves between elevated language, conversational detail, and comic interruption. The relationship between a teller and a tale often reveals tensions that the story alone would leave concealed.