Geoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer worked much of his life as a civil servant: customs controller for the Port of London, clerk of the King's Works, a diplomat sent repeatedly to France and Italy, where he likely encountered Boccaccio's and Dante's work directly. Poetry was written around a demanding day job, not instead of one.

The Canterbury Tales, begun in the 1380s and left unfinished at his death, frames its stories as a contest among pilgrims riding from London to Canterbury's shrine, each tale voiced in a manner suited to its teller: a structural trick borrowed from Boccaccio but pushed toward individual character in a way nothing in English had attempted.

He wrote in Middle English at a moment when French and Latin still carried more literary prestige, and the gamble worked: he's remembered as the father of English poetry, buried in what became Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner.