Charles Harpur was not alone among nineteenth-century writers to look with affection and admiration on the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. Harpur’s poem, “Chaucer” and his essay on the poet, sit in comfortable generic affiliation with the writings of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hunt, and others, on the medieval poet, though their opinions on the quality and import of Chaucer’s writings often differ. There are other references to Chaucer in early Australian writing, but Harpur’s is the most sustained expression of settler Chaucerianism in the nineteenth century. This paper analyses Harpur’s two “Chaucerian” texts, and his analysis of Chaucer’s prosody, semantics, sensibility, style, and spirit, showing how the Australian poet situates himself carefully in the long English tradition of praise for Chaucer, while also affirming his own critical, temporal, and cultural distance from the poet.
Stephanie Trigg is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Melbourne. She currently leads the ARC Discovery Project, Literature and the Face, with Joe Hughes (Melbourne) and Guillemette Bolens (University of Geneva). Stephanie was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2006, and served as Head of the English Section from 2019-2021. From 2008-2011 she was a Trustee of the New Chaucer Society and recently completed a two-year term as President of the Society (2022-2024). She is the author of many works on Australian and Medieval literature, including: Affective Medievalism: Love, abjection and discontent, with Thomas A. Prendergast (OUP, 2018); Shame and Honor: A Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter (U of Penn P, 2012); and Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture (ed.) (MUP, 2005).