Plato, in his Symposium, suggests that one could ascend the latter of love to glimpse truth in the beauty of the Forms; through love one could know beauty/truth. He also states in book ten of his Republic that: “all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them.” Plato believes that imitation of sensible objects removed the poet, and the observer, from truth and reality by inspiring the emotions of pity and fear. Plato argued that philosophical knowledge is far superior that the mere imitative nature of art. Dante, in his Divine Comedy, seems to also climb the ladder of love literally, metaphorically, and contextually to achieve the supreme artistic expression, Platonically speaking.

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Dante Alighieri was an epic poet who had grown out of a classical, pagan past into a pre-Renaissance Christian. While Dante was not familiar with the actual texts of Homer or other ancient Greeks, he was versed in their literature having discovered them through his own Italian predecessors, Virgil, Statius, Horace, and Latin translations of Aristotle and his Christian student Thomas Aquinas. With the Roman poet Virgil as his guide, Dante is able to traverse Hell and Purgatory; Dante recognizes Virgil as the image of Human Wisdom or rationality, not to mention the author of the Aeneid. Dante also considered Virgil to have anticipated the coming of Christ (Purgatory 70-2). Therefore, with Virgil as both his literary and rational guide and Beatrice as his beatific and heavenly inspiration, Dante is able to write his allegorical pilgrimage through Hell and the cosmos: The Divine Comedy — called a “comedy” because Dante the pilgrim journeys from grief to joy and “divine” because of the content and the artistic style. Yet along the path to salvation, Dante must purge himself of his own sinful nature, which will eventually include the repudiation of his own self. This journey begins in Hell where Dante hears the stories and witnesses the suffering of many sinners, some of which he empathizes with, and most of which he pities.

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With the waxing dominance of Christianity in late fourteenth-century England, the culture’s expectations had evolved to encompass new, more complicated views on human interrelations and the world view in general. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight represents a new conception of the heroic ideal, women, nature, and narrative technique. A comparison/contrast to Beowulf illustrates these changing ideals.

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Somewhere between the merry sensuality of Ovid and the ecstatic spirituality of Platonism is the tradition of Courtly Love. Courtly love resembles the Ovidian convention in that it is not supersensous: its aim is physical consummation, its object of love physical beauty. It differs from the Ovidian tradition in its interpretation of the nature of love. In the Courtly system, love is seen as an ennobling passion, the lady as an object of worship, and the conventions of courtship as religious rituals. The lady, furthermore, is venerated not simply as an ideal of physical beauty, but as an image or reflection of an ideal of spiritual beauty.

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Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, at least from a textual standpoint, remains unfinished. At least two tales are incomplete or interrupted, the Cook’s Tale and the Squire’s Tale, the order of the tales has been debated, and some of the tales are seemingly thrown in at the last minute. And within our current deconstructionist zeitgeist, critics like Catherine Belsey suggest that readers should not seek “the unity of the work, but the multiplicity and diversity of its possible meanings, its incompleteness, the omissions which it displays but cannot describe, and above all its contradictions” (365). So despite the obvious textual flaws and a multiplicity of meaning and interpretation, many thematic functions of The Canterbury Tales are, however, complete — at least in an Aristotelian sense in that they imitate life and its contradictions. Life rarely suggests unity intrinsically, but must have unity imposed upon it for its denizens’ comfort. We, as humans, decide that we will take the pilgrimage of life to its ultimate conclusion. We decide to impose that order on our ostensibly quixotic existences — we decide to play the game.

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SGGK is written in long stanzas and short, metered and rhymed, couplets, called “bob” and “wheel,” at the end of each verse. The alliteration, free from rhyme and rhythm, in the long stanzas is obviously influenced by Old English, while the “bob” and “wheel” signifies a Middle English influence.

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