Chaucer Quotes by Ben Jonson

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• Purists behave as if there was a vintage year when language achieved a measure of excellence which we should all strive to… — Jean Aitchison
• The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet… — George Saintsbury
• The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is… — Wendy Lesser
• The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything. — William Hazlitt
• And Chaucer, with his infantine Familiar clasp of things divine. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name… — Henry David Thoreau
• I have an unconscious burglar living in my mind: If I read something, it's mine. I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey… — David Eddings
• I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and… — James Joyce
• No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem. — Harold Bloom
• The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us. — James Lee Burke
• The quiet tenderness of Chaucer, where you almost seem to hear the hot tears falling, and the simple choking words sobbed out. — James Russell Lowell
• Chaucer followed Nature everywhere, but was never so bold to go beyond her. — John Dryden

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