Strangely enough, Chaucer was not particularly known for his poetry when he was alive—even though we now think of him as the go-to poet of medieval England. Instead, what made him popular among his peers and honored by the royal court was his life as a dedicated civil servant.

That's right: this famed wordsmith held down a series of what we might think of as boring, bureaucratic government jobs. Whee.

Maybe it was that whole serving-the-country-yawnfest that allowed his compelling inner life time to flourish. And thank goodness for that, because what a poet he was. Chaucer was the master of an amazing array of genres.

With Troilus and Criseyde, he gives us a good, old-fashioned romance. His translation of The Romance of the Rose delves right into allegory. And with Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, we get a two 'fer: an elegy with the added bonus of a dream vision.

He was also kind of a revolutionary. In his day, French was still the preferred language of the court. And Latin was still used to write down anything considered truly important. But Chaucer used the language associated with the less privileged classes (that would be English) to write some of the best works of all time.

He really showed them how English could be taken seriously as a literary language. Pretty impressive, when you think about it.

But wait, that's not all. If you call right now, we'll throw in The Canterbury Tales, the work in which Chaucer most showcases his poetic chops. In it, he juggles a ton of genres: everything from allegory to elegy, courtly romance to fabliaux (which is a fancy word that basically means medieval bathroom humor). Hats off, ladies and gentlemen; this dude's a true stud who has stood the test of time.

The Canterbury Tales 

The original road-trip dramedy. (Now, we have stuff like Tommy Boy and Road Trip, lucky us.) This is Chaucer's best known work. It presents a huge range of genres while also giving us a glimpse into 14th-century life. Win, win, and more win.

Troilus and Criseyde 

The title here gets you fairly far. If you immediately think of Romeo and Juliet, you're definitely in the ballpark. In this tale, Chaucer gives us an earlier set of star-crossed lovers whose tragic love doesn't fare well during the Trojan War. But then again, whose did? At least the story's an exciting mix of themes and genres. In it, Chaucer shows us that he can juggle courtly romance with a twist of Boethian philosophy.

Chew on This

The Canterbury Tales fits into a medieval genre called "estates satire." In this genre, the author would critique the various social classes of the time. So, the pilgrimage of the frame story brings together many different types of people that might not normally interact a lot during the 14th century. Do you think all these people would get along? Why or why not? To get some flavor of how this all works out, take a look at some quotes from The Canterbury Tales.

Chaucer was ahead of his time in more ways than one. In Troilus and Criseyde, he gives us an early example of the type of re-imagining-the-classics trend that's super popular right now—as in, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. He chooses to zoom in on a love story while the Trojan War is raging all around the city gates. Think about other versions of the Trojan War story you may have read, like Homer's The Iliad. In what ways does Chaucer's version of the war seem similar to those stories? Where does he drastically depart from the Classical retellings?