SOURCE: "The Art of Geoffrey Chaucer," in Proceedings of the British Academy, Oxford University Press, 1930, pp. 297-326.

Lowes is noted for his essays and lectures on poetry and is the author of Geoffrey Chaucer and the Development of His Genius. In the following excerpt from one of his published lectures, Lowes provides cultural, biographical, and literary sources for Chaucer's works.

My subject, as I have announced it, is a theme for a volume, but titles can seldom be brief and specific at once. I mean to limit myself to an attempt to answer—and that but in part—a single question: What, aside from genius, made the poet of the greater Canterbury Tales? How, in a word, did he master a technique at its height so consummate that if often seems not to be art at all, but the effortless play of nature? And by what various roads...