The opening lines of the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s great fourteenth-century literary work The Canterbury Tales is one of the most powerful and evocative poems about spring in all of English literature, from its first reference to the rejuvenating qualities of April showers through to the zodiacal allusions to […]
Tag: Geoffrey Chaucer
The Best Canterbury Tales Everyone Should Read
Ten of Chaucer’s greatest tales Geoffrey Chaucer left his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, unfinished when he died in 1400, having completed only one-fifth of the projected undertaking. Nevertheless, he left 20-odd tales finished, some of which are somewhat longer than others. What are the ten best Canterbury Tales? Below are […]
Five Fascinating Facts about John Lydgate
A short biography of a medieval poet 1. John Lydgate wrote one of the first true epic poems in the English language. Lydgate’s Troy Book runs to a whopping 30,000 lines, making it one of the longest poems in the English literature (as well as one of the earliest Lydgate […]