My hero: Geoffrey Chaucer

[English page]

 by Lavinia Greenlaw

In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer takes risks, breaks laws, invents words and enters the dark

 Detail of John Lydgate's Canterbury pilgrims – 'the Siege of Thebes' written c1420 – and designed as an addition to Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Photograph: Alamy

Lavinia Greenlaw

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/21/my-hero-geoffrey-chauc...

I was introduced to Chaucer when I was too young to know that the questions of how to live and how to live with each other are ones we never stop exploring. I studied “The Franklin’s Tale” first, the story of a couple who try to live as equals. This now seems extraordinary for the 14th century, but all I remembered was some hokum about the “grisly rokkes blake” off the coast of Brittany that had to be magicked away to avoid a shipwreck.

The work that made me realise Chaucer was not all horses and castles was Troilus and Criseyde, the greatest account you will ever read of people arguing themselves and each other into and out of love. Chaucer stole the story, made up a source and invented a form. He showed that English, on which the paint was still wet, could be as elegant and evocative as Latin or French. He was open to influence, intellectually mobile and properly curious. He wrote a treatise on the astrolabe for his 10-year-old son.

A soldier and civil servant, he survived years of political turbulence, and was put in charge of everything from wool to forests to building works. The busier he was, the more he wrote. His poetry earned him the royal gift of a gallon of wine a day, which he eventually arranged to be converted into cash. He read widely and across languages, and his translations were praised in French even as England and France went to war. Chaucer was greatly influenced by Italian poetry, arriving in Florence when Dante was only 50 years dead, and Petrarch and Boccaccio (from whom he lifted Troilus and Criseyde) still living.

In Troilus and Criseyde, he activates courtly love and complicates his characters. He casts a searching light on Troilus and listens to Criseyde. He takes risks, breaks laws, invents words and enters the dark. While going to some lengths to point out that he’s not providing any answers, he intervenes from the start,Chaucer remindings us why such works are written and what we read them for.

• Lavinia Greenlaw’s book A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde, shortlisted for the Costa poetry book award, is published by Faber.