The Poetry of Chaucer - Hardcover

Gardner, Mr. John

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Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809307723 ISBN 13: 9780809307722

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977

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The Poetry of Chaucer offers a reading of his poetry harmonious with the charac�ter of Chaucer as his own age knew and understood him. This new work by John Gardner is designed to comple�ment his biography of Chaucer being published by Alfred A. Knopf.

The Poetry of Chaucer is not simply one more sensitive reading of the poet’s work, nor is it, simply, a modern writ�er’s comment on the work of one of his two greatest English predecessors. Gardner’s reading of the poetry of Chaucer provides a persuasive synthesis of virtually the whole body of scholarly work done on Chaucer in the past twen�ty years the period of the critical revo�lution in Chaucerian studies. It may well be considered, for years to come, the definitive statement on how and why Chaucer wrote verse.

One purpose of Gardner’s The Poetry of Chaucer is to make the new evidence available to the nonspecialist. But Gardner’s larger purpose is to show how the various kinds of new evidence fit to�gether, to demonstrate how, for the reader willing to look down from the mountaintop, seemingly conflicting readings of Chaucer’s poetry can be recognized as parts of a harmonious whole. Gathering and assessing the results of the past twenty years of Chau�cer studies, adding striking new evi�dence derived from his own close anal�ysis of Chaucer’s poetry, and for the first time emphasizing the importance, throughout Chaucer’s work, of the most significant philosophical movement of Chaucer’s age, so-called Nominalism, Gardner creates a coherent image of Chaucer and Chaucer’s art.

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About the Author:

John Gardner is best known as a novelist and poet, author of Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, The King’s In�dian, and the epic poem Jason and Me�deia. He has also published children’s fiction, essays, innumerable scholarly articles, and several scholarly books. He lives in Bennington, Vermont.

Review:

Gardner proves a sensitive, acute reader of one of the two greatest English poets. . . . Gardner makes the arresting proposal that Chaucer was experimenting, far ahead of his time, with such mod�ern concepts as the unreliable narrator’ and the art of, so to speak, bad art.’ Crudely summarized, this must sound overingenious. But the energy, enthusiasm and complexity of Gardner’s argument stirs one to read Chaucer afresh.” Walter Clemons, Newsweek

Gardner puts Chaucer’s comic genius, gentle humanism and psychological insights into a new perspective. Synthe�sizing for the serious reader the past two decades of Chaucer studies, his book serves as an introduction to Chaucer’s magnificent, puzzling, delightful world.’” Publishers’ Weekly

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