![]() Arcite is released from prison and Palamon escapes they finally fight for Emilye's hand in a tournament. ![]() The plot concerns the rivalry of Palamon and Arcite, Theban knights, who while they are imprisoned by Duke Theseus fall in love with his fair kinswoman, Emilye. The poem is nominally a romance, adapted from Boccaccio's Teseida. 20 The trouble has been in the kinds of assumptions brought to the poem, in an attention to its poor dramatics rather than its rich symbolism, to its surface rather than its structure. The criticism of the Knight's Tale has long suffered from both of these errors. ![]() Similarly, if tradition seems to codify Chaucer's poetry according to a fixed number of general forms in a defined area of style, the particular structure and local style of each poem are unique.Ĭhaucer's conventionalism should neither be dismissed nor taken for granted. We do not read Chaucer, after all, for his philosophical conclusions, but for his workings-out, his poetry. If the themes of most of Chaucer's conventional poems seem to converge toward the single point of recognizing supernal values in human affairs, the nature of the pointing differs with each poem. ![]() A reasonable sympathy with conventionalism requires our understanding that the experience of the idealizing imagination is no less varied than that of realistic observation, and no less true. ![]()
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