SOURCE: Axton, Richard. “Gower—Chaucer's heir?” In Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, edited by Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, pp. 21-38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Axton determines that Gower was indebted to Chaucer, despite being the elder poet.

The idea of Gower as Chaucer's heir looks at first unpromising. It seems that Gower was the older and that, although he outlived Chaucer and the century by eight years, by then he was blind and poetically inactive. ‘Chaucer's master’, as Dr Johnson called him, has usually been counted as creditor and Chaucer as debtor in scholarly reckonings of the literary commerce between them. Gower appears older and also older-fashioned in liking long allegorical complaint poems and in choosing French and Latin for his first and second great works. When he turned to English narrative verse at the age of about fifty, it...