Geoffrey Chaucer, translator, rhetorician and courtly poet, has long been considered by the critics as the father of English poetry. However, this notion not only tends to forget a huge part of the history of Anglo-Saxon literature, but also to ignore the specificities of Chaucer’s style. The purpose of this thesis is accordingly to try to demonstrate that his contribution to the history of literature is much more important than we had previously imagined. Indeed, Chaucer’s decision to write in Middle-English, in a time when the hegemony of Latin and Old-French was undisputed (especially at the court of Edward III and Richard II), was consistent with an intellectual movement that was trying to give back to European vernaculars the prestige necessary to a genuine cultural production, which eventually led to the emergence of romance and of the modern novel. The assimilation of the specificities of the poetry of Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun thus allowed Chaucer to give back to English poetry some of its respectability. Nonetheless, it was his discovery of the Divina Commedia that made him aware of the true potential of literature: Dante thus allowed him to free the dialogism of his creations and to give his poetry a first-rate polyphonic dimension. As a result, if Chaucer cannot be thought of as the father of English poetry, he is however the father of English prose and one of the main artisans of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the polyphonic novel.

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