Geoffrey Chaucer established the East Midiands and London dialect, a vernacular language(the language spoken by common people),as the dominant form of literary language.
He was the first great English writer to try to reproduce in English, terms and literature of France and Italy. His best-known work, The Canterbury Tales is a vivid portrait of medieval English life. He was a page at the royal court; customs official, a diplomat and judge, member of parliament. He was fully in the social,political and cultural life of his time.
He was in contact with the great Italian art of the time and he read the works of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. In the firt phase of his literary carrier, the French phase, he translated the Le Roman de la Rose an allegorical poem on courtly love.In the second Italian phase, he wrote poems about dream visions, The Book of the Duchess, the Parliament of Fowls, the House of Fame. Chaucer’s narrative poem The Canterbury Tales is his masterpiece and the main work of his third English phase.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 verse tales — short stories written in verse instead of prose. The stories are told by a group of pilgrims on
their way to the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.
The tales are included in the framework of a pilgrimage.
Life as a journey is a theme of the poem and it was inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron (c. 1353)
The main difference between The Decameron and The Canterbury is that Chaucer’s characters are representative of the so-called three estates of medieval society in England the nobles, the clergy and the common people.
Chaucer was also a great metrical innovator: he introduced into English versification, the iambic pentameter (a ten—sillable line with an alternation of unstressed and stressed syllables) The CanterburyTales is written in couplets of iambic pentameters. Such a form would later be known as heroic or closed couplets. ——