Here also, despite the tragic and comic elements, Chaucer shows himself, as in the Book of the Duchesse, the Parlement, and the Canterbury Tales, our supreme poet of happiness. The poetry which represents peace and joy, desires fulfilled and winter overgone, the poetry born under festal Jove, is of a high and difficult order: if rarity be the test of difficulty, it is the most difficult of all. In it Chaucer has few rivals, and no masters.Related post: A Happy Spectator.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Our Supreme Poet of Happiness
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Allegory of Love (1936; rpt. Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 197 (discussing Troilus and Cryseide):