Four Hundred Years of Poetry: Trouthe

Chaucer outside Canterbury!

Dear bookish friend,

I have given this summer series a title now! Four Hundred Years of Poetry… I was originally writing it down as Five Hundred Years, but then I realized that would take us into about 1740, and the eighteenth century is a horrible place where I do not wish to go 😂 Let’s instead aim for the English Civil War as our finishing point in this little survey read.

I am a huge fan of the survey literature course, now mostly fallen out of favor in academia, and I’m pleased to mini-replicate it for this summer… it’s like comfort food. At the University of Arizona, the English department did it rather cleverly: They went from Beowulf to the first half of Paradise Lost in semester one, then from the second half of Paradise Lost to the eve of WWI in semester two. I still appreciate the idea of reading Milton as a hinge into modernity, looking forward and backward at once.

It was in the first half of that very survey course that it dawned upon me that Chaucer wrote other poetry than the Canterbury Tales. Shocking, I know!! We read Trouthe as one of a few instead of tackling a Tale in our limited time of reading Middle English (we read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight instead, a worthy exchange in my honest opinion). Today, we will read Trouthe together again. But first, a refresh on the “Father of English Literature.”