Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination. By Steve Ellis. Medieval Cultures, 24. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Pp. xiv + 204. $29.95.

How many British poets figure at all in the modern British, let alone North American, imagination? Very few. Some moderns: Eliot, Yeats, Auden, Larkin, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney recently; very few others. Of the unquestionably great, Shakespeare apart (and even his hold is weakening), perhaps Wordsworth (Lake District), Coleridge and Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning all have some special biographical interest, to which their poetry, Romantic and linguistically accessible as it is, is often treated as of less interest. Among the other truly great, Langland, Spenser, Milton, Herbert, even Donne, Dryden, Pope, live amongst the specialists only, and the great poetry of the King James version of the Bible hardly survives even amongst specialists. So Chaucer presents an unusual case, because his work is, in a sense, still truly alive in our philistine British culture.

Derek Brewer
Emmanuel College, Cambridge