How Selected Poems drew on The Canterbury Tales
A documented line of influence: John Dryden demonstrably engaged Geoffrey Chaucer’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer · c. 1400
MedievalThe influenced
Selected Poems
John Dryden · 1697
PoetsRelevance
8/10
On Selected Poems’s page
- When Dryden wanted models, he reached back three hundred years to Chaucer — modernizing the Knight's Tale into the couplets of Palamon and Arcite
- His Preface names the debt plainly: "I could have done nothing without him"
- Read the Tales first and you hear what Dryden was polishing — the same stories, the medieval grain of them, made new in his hands
On The Canterbury Tales’s page
- Three centuries on, Dryden rebuilt three of these tales in modern English couplets for his Fables, Ancient and Modern
- The Knight's Tale becomes his Palamon and Arcite; his Preface professes open veneration — "I could have done nothing without him"
- Chaucer's pilgrims kept finding new poets to carry them: Dryden's versions were later re-adapted again by Voltaire