Chaucer as a Father of English Poetry

Dryden has described 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 The Secret upon which
depended the future of English versification. With him Said Mathew Arnold, is
born our real poetry. In fact, Chaucer came as a breath of fresh air and transformed
English 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 importance
in 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 the
metrical 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.