Chaucer 'The father of literature'
Geoffrey Chaucer, greatly known as the Father of English literature and poetry, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages, and had an enormous effect on the English language of the time, as he was one of the first major poets to start using and standardising the Common London dialect of middle English, by using it in most of his literary works and solidifying it in writing.
Although Chaucer's language is far closer to Modern English than that of Beowulf, more so that a modern English speaker with a some understanding of slightly outdated words may understand it, many of his works have been modernised and it is fairly easy to transcribe them. "The Summoner's Tale" that compares Chaucer's text to a modern translation below. |
Through Chaucer's text English began to gain some traction in the lingual hierarchy, the poems he wrote became exceedingly popular, so much so that when he died on the 25th October 1400, he was the first poet to ever be buried at the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. Immortalizing him for generations to come as the first great poet.