Contents Introduction I. Poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer

Conclusion
In conclusion, Chaucer creates this kind of irony in his lyric poems usually in one of two ways: either he individualizes the speaker of the lyric, as he does, say, in To Rosemounde, and so implies the failure of the individual to live up to the ideal of the convention, or he actually puts the lyric itself into a narrative context, which shows 1n more detail the character of the individual speaker, and makes even more clear the discrepancy between the ideal words which the lover utters, and the lover's real position. Here, too, Chaucer was working with the traditional forms and genres he received from his courtly predecessors. He uses the traditional ballades (Against Women Unconstant) and roundels (Merciles Beaute), the traditional complaints (Complaint to his Lady) and salut d'amours (To Rosemounde), but he puts them into the mouths of individualized speakers rather than conventional "everyman" types, or he puts them into narrative contexts, all to show the lack of agreement between the ideal and the individual reality in his landmark book, Chaucer and the French Tradition, Charles Muscatine challenged the long-held tradition that Chaucer was an innovative "realist" in a time of literary dullness and didacticism. Chaucer' s position in literary history makes fuller sense if we consider him as belonging to that international, Gothic tradition of which French is the central literature. The earlier French tradition shows better than the English that Chaucer's realism is medieval, not modern or "Renaissance." It shows that his mixture of styles, rather than embodying some presumably advanced revolt from convention, is an expression of the very ambivalence of his culture, that it is the style of the period. Certainly Chaucer is working within the literary traditions of the late Middle Ages when he writes his lyrics. He does not break from tradition to write totally new kinds of poems. What he does do is use the tradition for his own ends, rather than tailor his ends to fit the tradition. Thus the tradition itself was forever altered for Chaucer's having written in it, which was T. S. Eliot's prescription for the proper relationship of tradition to the individual talent. One tradition which Chaucer inherited was the tradition of courtly love, born in eleventh-century Provence and developed by Chretien de Troyes and by Guillaume de Lorris. Chaucer received the tradition through the Roman de la Rose and from Machaut and his followers, and saw it, in altered form, in the love poems of Dante and of Petrarch. The ideal lover, refining his soul through love service to a distant goddess-like woman, had become so familiar, though, that particularly in Machaut's disciples, Chaucer surely detected form without substance. His solution was irony. The conventional cliches uttered by the lover in a courtly love poem became, in Chaucer, ironic since they contrasted with what Chaucer perceived as the proper object of love, the Highest Good. The proper love of man and woman was not the ideal courtly love situation, wherein the Beloved stands high above the lover and demands service, but rather the kind of mutual caring and understanding which a good marriage of natural companions, for instance, could bring (as in the Envoy to Scogan). Therefore Chaucer wrote his courtly poems, quite often, as parodies, pointing beyond the inadequate courtly situation to the universal love beyond it.
Although his favourite philosophers (Boethius and Macrobius), influenced by Neoplatonism, were realists, Chaucer's temperament seems not to have allowed him to accept the kind of position that would allow Dante, for example, to find in the love of a woman a route to the love of God. Though early 1n his career Chaucer seems to work in the realist tradition, culminating in Womanly Noblesse, Chaucer seems later to have swung toward nominalism.