Geoffrey Chaucer

The first act makes brilliant use of historical anachronism, bringing together six women—some fictional, some actual—from different historical periods: nineteenth-century Scottish traveller Isabella Bird ; Lady Nijo , a thirteenth-century Japanese courtesan turned nun; the...

During her first marriage LAC was often alone. She had books read aloud to her while she sewed: history, theology, Montaigne 's Essays, Spenser 's Faerie Queene, Chaucer 's works, Sidney 's Arcadia...

As a young adult CC took on her own education. With varying degrees of success she studied grammar, elocution, French, and the violin. She also discovered the public library. Colleagues at work got her to...

She notes that poets have lived difficult and unappreciated lives, and that many have been forgotten. Quoting a remark by Pope (that time, which has made Chaucer unintelligible, will one day do the same with...

Her selection runs from Edward the Confessor to Samuel Daniel . (The title-page mentions Gower , Langland, and Chaucer.) For each poet she provides a short biography and a scholarly and critical preface. Her judgements...

WC is a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century poet who treats everyday concerns, often in demanding forms, such as the sonnet or the villanelle. Her tone is colloquial and she makes these difficult forms look...

Again many poems first appeared in periodicals, from Mslexia to the Times Literary Supplement. Again there were earlier separate printings and particular commissions. An extended narrative poem, The Teacher's Tale, was commissioned for...

The real new departure in this book is The Teacher's Tale. Cope's homage to Chaucer is clear in her fast-running, colloquial narrative and her clear moral scheme of enjoyment and freedom on one side...

In this collection Cambridge again functions as an important subject. Frances Cornford saw her Cambridge poems as emblematic of her poetry as a whole. They served as a gauge for her poetic development and also...

The article is a short biography of John Wycliffe . CFC refers to him as a talented theologian and our first great reformer, who contributed (through his translation of the Bible into English, finished in...

It consists of an alphabetical list of English flowers, with excerpts under each from poets who wrote about that flower, from Chaucer and Shakespeare onwards.

After an immediate burial at St Anne's Church, Soho, Dryden was given a Westminster Abbey funeral and buried in the grave of Chaucer . Poets lamenting his death included the all-female contributors to The...

MD 's website features a series of poems indignantly addressed to William Langland , author of Piers Plowman, of behalf of the new, unacknowledged poor. The New Vision of Piers Plowless sets the scene:...

Alongside poems on national occasions, public sites, widely revered figures like Chaucer and Shakespeare , stand some deeply personal poems, like Pathway (which the Guardian reprinted on 27 September), in which the poet sees her...

Here, she said later, she came to life under the influence of her tutor, Dorothy Bednarowska , who taught me to read on the nuance and complexity of Chaucer 's Troilus and Criseyde. This...