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Chaucer
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  • The greatest writers, like Chaucer, or Shakespeare.†   (source)
  • That probably sounds as if my plans for the story have passed beyond mere ambition and into the land of lunacy… but ask your favorite English teacher sometime to tell you about the plans Chaucer had for The Canterbury Tales-now Chaucer might have been crazy.†   (source)
  • Chaucer was there, as were Roger Bacon, Alexandre Dumas, Cervantes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Jonathan Swift.†   (source)
  • Sorry, Mr. Chaucer.†   (source)
  • Even with a state education, she'd been required to read Steinbeck and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens.†   (source)
  • That wisdom, which seems to have been unavailable to Chaucer, or Dante, or Catullus, or Sophocles, or Shakespeare, or Dickens, is still with us, and, in 1969 it placed an inordinate burden on African American writers.†   (source)
  • Inside this building was where he'd studied Chaucer.†   (source)
  • He values the written word, whether it's in comic books or Chaucer, and he works desperately hard to do what he considers his job: to tell the story.†   (source)
  • The old verb axe appears fully conjugated in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde—axe, axen, axed.†   (source)
  • I thought that that first encounter would be the last of Heidi, but then her head appeared in a window of Linsly-Chit during my Chaucer class.†   (source)
  • Even as a schoolboy, I loved John Keats's ode "To Autumn" for being an ark of the covenant between language and sensation; as an adolescent, I loved Gerard Manley Hopkins for the intensity of his exclamations which were also equations for a rapture and an ache I didn't fully know I knew until I read him; I loved Robert Frost for his farmer's accuracy and his wily down-to-earthness; and Chaucer too for much the same reasons.†   (source)
  • I knew Mr. Chaucer's eyes were glaring in my direction, but I didn't bother to look.†   (source)
  • To be late was a felony in Mr. Chaucer's opinion, and to be almost late constituted a misdemeanor.†   (source)
  • I even imagined one of Mr. Chaucer's rambling lectures on public policy.†   (source)
  • I believe that was the worst day of Mr. Chaucer's life," I said.†   (source)
  • They considered English a polluted, free-thinkers language for profane men like Chaucer and Shakespeare.†   (source)
  • For centuries, iambic pentameter had been a preferred poetic meter of outspoken literati across the globe, from the ancient Greek writer Archilochus to Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and Voltaire—bold souls who chose to write their social commentaries in a meter that many of the day believed had mystical properties.†   (source)
  • Chaucer says so, as do John Bunyan, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Robert Frost, Jack Kerouac, Tom Robbins, Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise.†   (source)
  • Even Chaucer's pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales (1384), while neither they nor their tales are inevitably holy, are making an Easter pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, and much of their talk invokes the Bible and religious teaching.†   (source)
  • Every now and then he frowned, as if wondering why he couldn't find anything by Dickens, Chaucer, or Austen.†   (source)
  • And she talked about Shakespeare and Chaucer while the rain came to an end at last and the clouds began to break and weak beams of sunlight shone on to the sodden wilderness.†   (source)
  • His teacher calmed him down, his professor in African-American literature gave him a modern English translation of Chaucer, and he finished that course with an A. He had begun to find his way around the curriculum, thanks mainly to a graduate student who befriended him.†   (source)
  • Like a stalker, I listened in on their conversation while Mr. Chaucer started writing the lecture notes on the whiteboard.†   (source)
  • I took my seat in the very back of the room and started to open my notebook, hoping to God that Mr. Chaucer wouldn't call me out on my near tardiness.†   (source)
  • Mr. Chaucer gave me a dirty look through his squinting eyes, impressing upon me that the bell would ring any second.†   (source)
  • Mr. Chaucer's AP government class consisted of only nine students, and seven of them were already in the room by the time I walked through the door.†   (source)
  • Mr. Chaucer wasn't very specific.†   (source)
  • I barely heard a word Mr. Chaucer said all block, and when the bell rang, my page of notes, which should have been full of details from the lecture, consisted of only two short, barely legible sentences.†   (source)
  • His seat was completely, one hundred percent empty when I walked into the classroom (for once I was way early, the way Mr. Chaucer liked), and my heart kind of sank a little bit …. or, you know, a lot.†   (source)
  • "Fine," Mr. Chaucer muttered.†   (source)
  • So did Mr. Chaucer.†   (source)
  • That was about 1470, soon after Chaucer's time.†   (source)
  • I also read Chaucer with pleasure; and began a book—the memoirs of Madame de la Fayette—which interested me.†   (source)
  • Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.†   (source)
  • In this direction, if you happened to be broad-minded, you might have been amused to see the saucy Alisoun who cried 'Tee-Hee!" after she had been given the unusual kiss which Chaucer tells about.†   (source)
  • Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue.†   (source)
  • Other spectacles even more dramatic have been mentioned by Chaucer: the smyler with the knyf under the cloke, the careyne in the bush with throte y-corve, or the colde deeth with mouth gaping upright.†   (source)
  • The royal peacocks were as bare as an old broom—most of the crack shots liked to have what Chaucer calls pecock arwes, because they were more classy—and the smell of boiling glue rose to high heaven.†   (source)
  • He had to perfect himself for Arthur as somebody who was good at games, and he had to think about the theories of chivalry even when he was in bed at night He had to teacji himself to possess a sound opinion on hundreds of disputed points —on the proper length of weapons, or the cut of a mantling, or the articulation of a pauldron, or whether cedarwood was better man ash for spears, as Chaucer seems to have believed.†   (source)
  • Such is the happy position of Homer,[550] perhaps; of Chaucer,[551] of Saadi.†   (source)
  • In midevil times most of the people were alliterate. the greatest writer of the time was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verses and also wrote literature.†   (source)
  • This company of pilgrims resembled Chaucer's in this: that it had in it a sample of about all the upper occupations and professions the country could show, and a corresponding variety of costume.†   (source)
  • CHAUCER.†   (source)
  • Chaucer.†   (source)
  • Thus far I am of the opinion of Chaucer's nun, who "yave not of the text a pulled hen That saith that hunters ben not holy men."†   (source)
  • …had ever read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for me if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in the least, had those same unprofitable pages been written with a pen like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a Custom-House officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good lesson—though it may often be a hard one—for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means,…†   (source)
  • But Chaucer is a huge borrower.†   (source)
  • Within the shadow, I may figuratively say, of that religious edifice immortalized by Chaucer, which was anciently the resort of Pilgrims from the remotest corners of — in short,' said Mr. Micawber, 'in the immediate neighbourhood of the Cathedral.'†   (source)
  • CHAUCER: Canterbury Tales.†   (source)
  • Chaucer.†   (source)
  • Homer lies in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, "It was rumored abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with repentance?"†   (source)
  • CHAUCER.†   (source)
  • He who first opens Chaucer, or any other ancient poet, is so much struck with the obsolete spelling, multiplied consonants, and antiquated appearance of the language, that he is apt to lay the work down in despair, as encrusted too deep with the rust of antiquity, to permit his judging of its merits or tasting its beauties.†   (source)
  • [556] Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgat[557] and Caxton,[558] from Guido di Colonna,[559] whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius,[560] Ovid,[561] and Statius.†   (source)
  • The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature; and, more recently, not only Pope[554] and Dryden[555] have been beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily traced.†   (source)
  • We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer,[33] of Marvell,[34] of Dryden,[35] with the most modern joy,—with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses.†   (source)
  • Shakspeare, Homer, Dante,[647] Chaucer, saw the splendor of meaning that plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in all their natural history a certain mute commentary on human life.†   (source)
  • The Greek poems themselves, continuously transcribed and studied in Byzantium, reasserted their presence in Western Europe from the early Renaissance, first in Latin translations for writers like Boccaccio and Chaucer, and finally in the first published Greek text, printed at Florence in 1488.†   (source)
  • The same thing happened when I tried to discuss Chaucer with an American literature specialist, questioned an Orientalist about the Trobriand Islanders, and tried to focus on the problems of automation-caused unemployment with a social psychologist who specialized in public opinion polls on adolescent behavior.†   (source)
  • [40] /To fellowship/, once in good American use but now reduced to a provincialism, is in Chaucer.†   (source)
  • The New English Dictionary offers examples much older—from Chaucer, Wyclif and Gower.†   (source)
  • All of them are in Chaucer.†   (source)
  • Chaucer, at the beginning of the period of transition to Modern English, used the double negative with the utmost freedom.†   (source)
  • Chaucer used /growed/ for /grew/ in the prologue to "The Wife of Bath's Tale," and /rised/ for /rose/ and /smited/ for /smote/ are in John Purvey's edition of the Bible, /circa/ 1385.†   (source)
  • In Anglo-Saxon the word was /heora/, and down to Chaucer's day a modified form of it, /here/, was still used in the possessive plural in place of the modern /their/, though /they/ had already displaced /hie/ in the nominative.†   (source)
  • The result of this movement toward identity in form was a confusion between the two classes of words, and from the time of Chaucer down to the eighteenth century one finds innumerable instances of the use of the simple adjective as an adverb.†   (source)
  • All the American dialect needs, in the long run, to make even pedagogues acutely aware of it, is a poet of genius to venture into it, as Chaucer ventured into the despised English of his day, and Dante into the Tuscan dialect, and Luther, in his translation of the Bible, into peasant German.†   (source)
  • His advocacy of /deef/ for /deaf/ had popular support while he lived, and he dredged up authority for it out of Chaucer and Sir William Temple, but the present pronunciation gradually prevailed, though /deef/ remains familiar in the common speech.†   (source)
  • "He will answer /trewe/" is in Sir Thomas More; "and /soft/ unto himself he sayd" in Chaucer; "the singers sang /loud/" in the Revised Version of the Bible (Nehemiah xii, 42), and "/indifferent/ well" in Shakespeare.†   (source)
  • …and prophets, and deep idyls of the Nazarene, The Iliad, Odyssey, plots, doings, wanderings of Eneas, Hesiod, Eschylus, Sophocles, Merlin, Arthur, The Cid, Roland at Roncesvalles, the Nibelungen, The troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, skalds, Chaucer, Dante, flocks of singing birds, The Border Minstrelsy, the bye-gone ballads, feudal tales, essays, plays, Shakespeare, Schiller, Walter Scott, Tennyson, As some vast wondrous weird dream-presences, The great shadowy groups gathering…†   (source)
  • See note 5 to Chaucer's tale of Meliboeus.†   (source)
  • In the Parson's Tale Chaucer says: "Envie and ire maken bitternesse in heart, which bitternesse is mother of accidie."†   (source)
  • L'Envoy of Chaucer.†   (source)
  • CHAUCER'S TALE OF MELIBOEUS.†   (source)
  • CHAUCER'S TALE OF SIR THOPAS.†   (source)
  • [Here ends the Second Part of the Treatise; the Third Part, which contains the practical application of the whole, follows entire, along with the remarkable "Prayer of Chaucer," as it stands in the Harleian Manuscript:—] De Tertia Parte Poenitentiae.†   (source)
  • Annualere: a priest employed in singing "annuals" or anniversary masses for the dead, without any cure of souls; the office was such as, in the Prologue to the Tales, Chaucer praises the Parson for not seeking: Nor "ran unto London, unto Saint Poul's, to seeke him a chantery for souls."†   (source)
  • Thus will our text: but natheless certain I can right now no thrifty* tale sayn, *worthy But Chaucer (though he *can but lewedly* *knows but imperfectly* On metres and on rhyming craftily) Hath said them, in such English as he can, Of olde time, as knoweth many a man.†   (source)
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