Paragraph on “Who was the first great English poet?” complete paragraph for Class 9, Class 10, Class 11 and Class 12

Who was the first great English poet?

Geoffrey Chaucer is considered by many to be the first great English poet. He lived from about 1345 to 1400 and his writings were greatly influenced by the work of earlier French and Italian writers. He wrote a number of poems one of which is a romance about the Trojan war called Troilus and Cressida. He also wrote the famous Canterbury Tales. This is a collection of stories of widely different kinds, each told by a pilgrim on his way to Canterbury to the shrine of St Thomas Becket. The pilgrims themselves, whose journey links the tales, are a splendid and motley collection of people, all vividly alive, who show us what kind of men and women lived and worked in the fourteenth century.

After Chaucer, there was no great English poet for almost 15o years. In the middle of the fifteenth century though, Sir Thomas Malory produced a masterpiece of English prose in his Morte d’ Arthur. This is a re-telling of the stories of King Arthur, gathered from a number of different sources. It was published in 1485 (which was 14 years after the death of the author) and was one of the first books to be printed by William Caxton at his famous press at Westminster, London.