Reading Chaucer's poems - Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer is rightly regarded as
the Father of English Literature. His observant wit, his narrative skill
and characterization, his linguistic invention, have been a well from
which the language's greatest writers have drawn: Shakespeare, Pope,
Austen, Dickens among them. A courtier, a trade emissary and diplomat, he fought in the
Hundred Years War and was captured and ransomed; his marriage into the
family of John of Gaunt ensured his influence in political society. For
more than a decade, he was engaged on his most famous work of all, The Canterbury Tales, until his death around 1400; there is no record of the precise date or the circumstances of his demise, despite vivid and colourful speculation.

Bernard O'Donoghue is one of the country's leading poets and
medievalists. His accessible new selection includes a linking commentary on the
chosen texts, together with a comprehensive line-for-line glossary that
makes this the most approachable and accessible introduction to Chaucer
that readers can buy.