3. A life in poetry

Abstract

It was once thought that Chaucer’s creative career developed from a French phase through Italian to a final triumph of English, but Chaucer never stopped learning from Francophone poets, and never stopped speaking French. ‘A life in poetry’ explains how Chaucer was then inspired by the verse forms of Dante’s Commedia and Boccaccio’s the Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia and Il Filostrato. Italian proved liberatory for Chaucer not just because its hendecasyllabic (eleven syllable) lines allow more poetic elbow room than French octosyllabics, but because its metrics lie much closer to English. Chaucer finally settled on a form he seems to have invented: rhyme royal, a seven-line stanza, rhyming ababbcc.