Chaucer, more clearly than most poets, shows the whole artistic progress from expert verse translation through convention accepted and convention modified to creation. From the _Roman de la Rose_ through his study of Boccaccio to the _Canterbury Tales_ his work comprehends in itself much of the history of medieval poetic. He was ahead of his time; that is, he was artist enough to feel new currents of thought and new ventures in expression, to bend toward these the received modes, and finally to enlarge the scope and perfect the technic of medieval narrative. The Renaissance movement, which he was quick to feel in Italy, he could not communicate to England. It had to be brought again, and in different ways. But the art of narrative, most popular of medieval arts, he led from accepted poetic habits in new directions and to new achievements. Consummate metrist, he knew what to do in English with the richer couplet, the more fluent stanza, of Boccaccio. Composition in the larger sense he learned more slowly. The road is long from the leisurely conventions of the _Book of the Duchesse_ to the intensity of the _Pardoner_ and the sustained poetic progress of the _Troilus and Criseyde_. All the more clearly he illuminates the significance of previous experiments by revealing what was vital in their technic. For since he was a studious artist, and even a critic, as well as a genius, his career epitomizes the progress of medieval verse narrative. Medieval poetic may fairly be said to end with his death in 1400. 1. Poetic Conventions in the Earlier Poems The first part of the _Roman de la Rose_, Chaucer’s literary point of departure, represents the conventions and the mood of the fashionable fiction of courtly love. Its allegory is simple personification carried out by costume and attitude, less by speech and action, appropriate to type. It is less narrative than descriptive. Relying mainly on style, it has so little vigor of composition that in spite of its great medieval vogue it has been long dead. Chaucer’s translation shows no small command of diction and of verse. Though the French octosyllabic and the English line of four stresses differed less then than later, translation had much to teach a bilingual poet not only reading, but constantly hearing and speaking two rhythms. It made him early aware both of the difference between the two and of the directions of development for the English of his choice. He has already found variations to evade the tendency of this short couplet toward jingling monotony; and still more verse control is evident in his catching one of the chief charms of the original, its easy fluency.