Chaucer's Poetry Lesson Plan

"The House of Fame" was written by Chaucer during a time when he was increasingly influenced by Italian poets like Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. What signs of this do you see in the poem?

This question allows for a variety of answers: for example, some students may find interesting parallels between the eagle who transports Chaucer to the House of Fame, explaining the nature of the universe as he goes, and Virgil, who guides Dante through the afterlife in Dante’s Divine Comedy. And, as other students may point out, in "The House of Fame" there seems to be a self-conscious effort on the part of the poet to literally rub elbows with writers from classical antiquity, a...