How William Wordsworth, Selected Poems drew on The Canterbury Tales
A documented line of influence: William Wordsworth 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
William Wordsworth, Selected Poems
William Wordsworth · 1815
PoetsRelevance
6/10
On William Wordsworth, Selected Poems’s page
- Among these poems is Wordsworth's own modern-English rendering of Chaucer's Prioress' Tale — a Romantic poet reaching directly back to the medieval source
- Read the Tales first and the homage lands: Wordsworth translated them, he said, "out of my love and reverence for Chaucer"
- The line from medieval English verse to Romantic poetry, drawn by Wordsworth's own hand
On The Canterbury Tales’s page
- Wordsworth went so far as to translate Chaucer — The Prioress' Tale, The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, The Manciple's Tale — into modern English
- He did it, in his own words, "mainly out of my love and reverence for Chaucer"
- Five centuries on, one of the great Romantics still bent his ear to the medieval master