The Poetry of Chaucer

“Gardner proves a sensitive, acute reader of one of the two greatest English poets. . . . Gardner makes the arresting proposal that Chaucer was experimenting, far ahead of his time, with such mod­ern concepts as the ‘unreliable narrator’ and ‘the art of, so to speak, bad art.’ Crudely summarized, this must sound overingenious. But the energy, enthusiasm and complexity of Gardner’s argument stirs one to read Chaucer afresh.”—Walter Clemons, Newsweek

“Gardner puts Chaucer’s comic genius, gentle humanism and psychological insights into a new perspective. Synthe­sizing for the serious reader the past two decades of Chaucer studies, his book serves as an introduction to Chaucer’s ‘magnificent, puzzling, delightful world.’”—Publishers’ Weekly