What is Chaucer's contribution to English poetry?
Chaucer is sometimes referred to as the "father of English poetry." Part of the reason for this is that he was writing in Middle English and his work marks a major transition between the scanty remnants we have of Anglo-Saxon epic and early religious poetry and the development of a modern English poetic corpus.
Perhaps Chaucer's most important achievement was his role in the formation of the English vernacular as a tool for poetry. Most of the English poets in his period wrote in French or Latin for court or ecclesiastical audiences. In contrast, Chaucer wrote in English, which was accessible to a wider audience. His subject matter, too, while it included courtly romance, also often dealt with the ordinary lives of the bourgeois. In The Canterbury Tales, for example, among his pilgrims are many commoners, who are described in an unusually realistic manner.
Chaucer is also a key figure...
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in the development and regularization of iambic pentameter as the standard meter for English poetry. He was especially important for using accentual syllabic verse that blended the strong stress tradition of Old English with French accentual meter.
Chaucer was considered the "English Homer" (http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/middleages/welcome.htm). That means that his writing did more for the English language (to solidify it) than anyone else before his time. With the invasion of William the Conqueror in 1066, everyone was required to speak French; that's why English has so many Latin and French words today. It is interesting to note that the Norton Anthology introduction on the above-mentioned website also says:
"One of the results of the Norman Conquest was that the structure and vocabulary of the English language changed to such an extent that Chaucer, even if he had come across a manuscript of Old English poetry, would have experienced far more difficulty construing the language than with medieval Latin, French, or Italian. If a King Arthur had actually lived, he would have spoken a Celtic language possibly still intelligible to native speakers of Middle Welsh but not to Middle English speakers."
Chaucer was a great poet. I think that when a writer's works are still loved and studied years later, that shows a real contribution. Also, Chaucer is foundational to other English works that came later. I think that The Canterbury Tales still attract people's imaginations the most.
What was Chaucer's contribution to English literature?
In the preface to a publication of The Canterbury Tales, editor D. Laing Purves writes,
Perhaps in the entire range of ancient and modern literature there is no work that so clearly and freshly paints for future times the picture of the past; certainly no Englishman has ever approached Chaucer in the power of fixing for ever the fleeting traits of his own time.
In or around 1378, Chaucer began to develop his conception of writing poetry in English, a language that would be linguistically accessible to all. This use of English would be obedient neither to the court, whose official language was French (Chaucer had written poetry himself in French) nor to the Church, whose official language was Latin.
Arguably, then, one of Geoffrey Chaucer's most significant contributions to English literature is his having written his magnificent work, The Canterbury Tales, in the language of the English people. That the two powerful forces of the court and the Church were bypassed for the sake of writing in English, making his work more accessible to the people, afforded Chaucer's work more widespread appeal, and it created a remarkable portrait of medieval England. In what is considered by many to be his magnum opus, Chaucer revealed the changes taking place in the English language and in society as a whole. His work also stands as a significant achievement in Middle English verse.
What is Geoffrey Chaucer's influence on English and its literature?
This is a huge question - and people have written whole books in order to answer it. I can provide you with the main points though:
- Chaucer considerably expanded the word-stock of English, being one of the
first poets in the language to utilise its tremendous variety, bringing in
words from a variety of languages which were converging with English during the
Middle Ages. Chaucer's "first instances" of words include words from Greek,
Latin, Arabic, German and French - and the following regularly-used words:
acceptable, altercation, annoyance, arbitration, army, arrogant, arsenic, arc,
and aspect.
- Chaucer made several metrical innovations to the way poetry and verse were
written in English.
- He was one of the first poets to consistently break out of the medieval
alliterative tradition and write in accentual-syllabic metre (lines constructed
around both the number of syllables and where the accents on
those lines fall).
- Chaucer was one of the first to use the five-stress line, which led the way
to the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare adn Marlowe. "The Legend of Good Women"
is one of the first times five-stress lines appear in rhyming couplets - a form
which then became a norm in English poetry.
- He was one of the first poets to consistently break out of the medieval
alliterative tradition and write in accentual-syllabic metre (lines constructed
around both the number of syllables and where the accents on
those lines fall).
- You can also see the influence on Chaucer on a whole load of writers. To give one example, Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" owes much to Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde".