Believing poetry to convey the most essential truths and yet being asked to use it to legitimate the blunt use of power in the highest places, the fifteenth-century English poet developed a laureate poetics, a set of practices aimed at resolving this conundrum. This book tells the story of the rise and subsequent influence of this poetics as well as its doppelganger, the poetics of begging. The burden of this first chapter is to offer defenses for some of the assumptions underlying this story and, in the process, to introduce terms, concepts, and argumentative frameworks that will recur throughout the study.

Although the post of poet laureate as we know it was not established until John Dryden's appointment in 1668, much earlier the ideas and practices associated with the laureateship exerted influence on the course of English poetry. Making their way northward from trecento Italy, these ideas and practices affected each of the vernacular traditions they encountered, reaching England in the late fourteenth century in the work of Chaucer. The very marked impact that they subsequently had on English verse was, however, by no means inevitable. Indeed, their initial explicit appearance in the prologue to the Clerk's Tale (1390s?) was hardly auspicious. In their brief debut, Chaucer, characteristically, subjects their authority to scrutiny and doubt, even while invoking it.