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1 Introduction “What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.” Bacon’s swift indictment of Pilate—that quintessential symbol of postlapsarian man, frivolous in the divine presence and smug in the belief that neither Christ nor truth matters—emphasizes the enormous difference between absolute reality and man’s flawed perception of reality. Long before Bacon quoted Pilate’s supercilious inquiry, put to Truth’s face, the same biblical scene came to Chaucer’s mind as he was advising a friend that a flawed perception of love might be leading him to marriage.1 Unlike Pilate viewing truth skeptically, Chaucer apparently understood love to subsume all things true, beautiful, and harmonious, although the precise meaning he attributed to the word may be difficult to grasp. His dream visions and the Troilus and Criseyde studied in the following chapters are often said to be about love, but the texts of these works do not support the claim. When a line in the Parliament of Fowls states unambiguously, “Al this mene I by Love” (4), the phrase “Al this” refers to some unnamed craft or skill, and leads directly to a philosophical treatise on the harmony of the universe. If the usual understanding of love is not, then, the actual subject of Chaucer’s poetry, literature is immeasurably richer that he stayed a lifetime to discover what love is, to understand its various forms, to show it in his poetry, and to show it as poetry. Ockham argues that love, like every abstraction, can only exist in concrete demonstrations, in the variety of details that enrich the portraits of persons who love. The dress and trappings Chaucer gives his characters may reflect their values, as their oblique speeches perhaps reveal what their literal words are often meant to conceal. But that “faire cheyne” (CT I.2988) he names again and again takes us higher, away from these characters and their accoutrements , away from ourselves, to love’s wider context, the eternity on which all his works subtly focus.2 He keeps this context at a less intense level than the immediate attention he gives to life’s surfaces. His particular subject, then, is the sum of all the objects and sounds in his poetry, while this wider love remains as a remote, yet ever present, implication.  / Chapter 1 Asecondallusivecontext,influencingalmosteverythingintheforeground of Chaucer’s poetry, gives the works studied here still another facet of meaning . Each of the poems discussed in the following chapters reveals Chaucer’s concern with matters that challenge him as a practicing poet. To begin, he focuses in the Book of the Duchess on the practical matters of winning patronage and achieving an acceptable poetic form. The Parliament of Fowls, while displaying a variety of subjects explored by prior poets, virtually defines poetry as a subset of universal harmony whose unwitting seekers show varieties of chaos more often than the understanding Chaucer promotes. And in the House of Fame, he worries about the genus and species of this thing called poetry. One of Fame’s characters, a wittily energetic eagle, spreads a complicated series of syllogisms across 173 lines (HF 711–883) to demonstrate that, since poetry is speech, and “spech is soun” (762), and “Soun ys noght but eyr ybroken” (765), poetry must be nothing but broken air. Putting aside olfactory sensibilities, the insufficient definition possesses enough truth to include the broken air that offends Lady Nature in another of his poems (PF 568–617). Elsewhere, Fame’s professorial eagle, still lecturing on the standard fare of poets, pronounces harshly on typical audiences, “Loo, ys it not a gret myschaunce / To lete a fool han governaunce / Of thing that he can not demeyne?” (HF 957–59). The eagle’s judgment much concerns the subject of the final chapter. Troilus and Criseyde profoundly inquires into events of the past—an insoluble question, since recorded history itself often bears a dubious relation to facts. What then of the opinions of audiences? True, audiences are important, Chaucer maintains through his horseback editor of the Canterbury Tales, for if a man lacks an audience there is no point in his airing his thoughts (CT VII.2801–2). All of these ruminations appear again and again in the poetry examined here. The suggestion that Chaucer has a main subject, the daily lives of the men and women he creates, and two surrounding contexts of uncertain relation to this subject—macrocosmic love and the creation of poetry—implies different authorial...

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