Chaucer's Psychologizing of Virgil's Dido

It is my understanding, concerning the deeper meaning of Chaucer's poetry, that he rejects much of medieval reality and takes to a psychological view of life and man. I find in his poetry an original amalgam of definiteness-about the what and how of things-and a very modem vagueness, an awareness of and a capacity to use ambiguity. Much of what seems perplexingly ironic, strangely orthodox, or otherwise difficult to harmonize in his poetry answers to this view. His early poetry in particular I regard as a poetry of rejection. Orthodoxy he puts aside in The Book of the Duchess;1 conventionalized love in The Parliament of Fowls; and teleological order in The House of Fame. He thus sets aside much of medieval belief, it seems to me, because his intellect demanded, on the one hand, an empirical truth, and his new sense of person, on the other, could not tolerate a return to the collective morality of orthodoxy. In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer turns directly to human nature humanistically conceived. Personality, a child of intellect, was required to satisfy his new sense of reality.2 His move into pathedy,3 that is, into the drama of human emotions, became inevitable once he had withdrawn his faith from the medieval model, that is, emptied his faith, such as it was, of its literalness. Conventional allegory requires a structured, vital, and autonomous order, a meaningful world designed by God. Once this fails, allegory retreats further into man, into drama.4 It becomes, then, a structured correspondence, not between a theology and the world, but between human actions and their assumed significance. From an even further intellectualized position of the drama of the absurd, such assumed significance itself becomes as artificial as did earlier allegory to the first rationalism. Chaucer's