Chaucer as a Father of English Poetry

Dryden has described Chaucer as the“Father of English Poetry”and he

richly deserve this title. Indeed, Chaucer is the“Father of English
Poetry”because he created that literary form of the English language
which, in all essential features, remains upto the present day, the accepted
from of literary English. He found English dry, uncouth brick but left it
marble-beautiful and full of liquid luster. He found it a dialect and made
it Standard English. He taught this fellow speaking
countrymen“TheSecret upon which depended the future of English
versification”.Poet Mathew Arnold said, “with him is born our real
poetry”. In fact, Chaucer came as a breath of fresh air and transformed
English poetry as a standard poetry which was crude, imperfect and in an
infantile state.

Chaucer made beauty and melody the guiding principles of his work, and
became the pioneer of the metrical principles which have survived in
English poetry to this day.By the magic of his touch he raised a dialect
into language. He made the English language a first rate literary medium.
In an age when English poetry needed invigoration he gave it new life and
showed it fresh path.

As Chaucer is the last of medieval, he is the first of the moderns. His

importancein the development of English literature is very great because
he removed poetry from the mirror upto nature.

With Chaucer the English language and English literature grew up. He
has themetrical craftsmanship to handle English with a subtlety, a
flexibility and a polish which made it at one the equal, as a literary
language of French or Italian. He has the European consciousness, too, to
enable him to render in English the dominant themes and attitudes of
European literature and at the same time the English national
consciousness to allow him to present the English scene as it has never
been presented before.
The critics on Chaucerian poetry are almost unanimous in their verdict
that he was not merely a poet of Medieval times but a poet of all the times
and that he certainly stands on the thresholds of the New age. He was the
pioneer of real and genuine type of English Poetry. G.K. Chesterton
aptly observes: There was never a man who was more of a maker than
Chaucer. He made a national language for so great a nation. Shakespeare
and Milton were the greatest sons of their country, but Chaucer was the
Father of his country.