Introducing the concept of verse history and adapting Roman Jakobson's distinction between verse design and verse instance, this chapter considers a sequence of brief case studies drawn from the work of multiple writers: the Beowulf poet, William Langland, the Gawain poet, John Gower, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Willis, Victoria Chang, and André 3000. The chapter proposes that, even after free verse, reading poetry historically still must involve a consideration of the relationship of rhythm to meter. The potential for friction between verse instance and verse design, and more broadly between poems and poetry, implies a need for relations of supplementarity. Moments of rhythmical disturbance disclose how what one had located outside the lone poem – a metrical template, a political ideal, or a historical event – comes rushing into it and through it.

This essay argues that Chaucer’s ‘English context’ cannot be divided from multiple other European and insular contexts. English as a language was the product of multiple waves of colonialism; England was a multilingual place; ‘English’ literature was heavily influenced by other literatures, especially literature written in Latin, French and Italian. It is traditional to assert that Chaucer mocked his English heritage through Sir Thopas, a pastiche of the popular ‘tail-rhyme’ genre. However, Chaucer was well aware of the variety and richness of English literary tradition. Manuscripts such as Auchinleck remind us of the many different things that English could do at this time, including estates satire, complaint and debate. Alliterative poems such as Pearl reveal contemporary poets’ ability to bring together diverse literary forms. Chaucer was exceptional not because he wrote in English but because of his unerring capacity to knit together multiple, interlinked, multilingual sources and traditions to create new things of wonder.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.

Chaucer’s early fame as the founding father of the English literary tradition is still justified on the basis of his linguistic and metrical achievements. However, he was only one of a number of later fourteenth-century writers engaged in making English a fit medium for literature. While Chaucer experimented with bringing complex continental forms of metre and stanza into English, the poets of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, the Morte Arthure, and Piers Plowman were turning the traditional alliterative metre into a vehicle to display poetic virtuosity. Chaucer’s prose works of learning and philosophy also have distinguished competitors. His translations of the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius and his Treatise on the Astrolabe were made at the same time as huge encyclopaedic and historical works were being translated into English by his contemporary John Trevisa. The work of Chaucer’s competitors, much of it now neglected, offers revealing perspectives on his achievements.