Chaganti, Seeta. "Chaucer, Virgil, and erasure poetry." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/chaucer-virgil-and-erasure-poetry. [Date accessed].
Chaucer, Virgil, and erasure poetry
Chaucer's anxiety of influence in The House of Fame.
Chaucer's House of Fame is a strange poem, one that is compulsive in its use of allusions and citations. The poem is a dream vision in which a poet finds himself in a hall of images of famous people from the past, asking the reader to consider the power dynamics involved between authors who influence each other. Teaching this poem alongside contemporary poet Jordan Abel's book The Place of Scraps helps students imagine the links between influence from Chaucer to now. Abel, a Nisga'a poet from British Columbia, wrote his collection through the erasure of a 20th-century anthropological work, Totem Poles, by the white Ottowan settler Marius Barbeau. Putting Abel and Chaucer in conversation allows students to consider the issues of source, adaptation, colonization, and race in our literary lineage.
Further learning
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Spenser and his racializing influences
Comparing episodes from The Faerie Queene with episodes from the works that inspired Spenser, in particular excerpts from Ariosto’s and Tasso’s works, is a productive way to draw attention to how racialization travels and mutates across national traditions.
