Chaucer as a poet of transition?

Chaucer is a poet
of transition between a conversational colloquial style and a lofty poetic style.

As Dante and Petrarch, two poets Chaucer cites throughout the Canterbury Tales, exalted
the Italian language through the refinement of their native Tuscan vernacular, Chaucer enriches
English. He does this first by choosing to engage with English when many of his contemporaries
preferred to write in Latin, and second by borrowing not just plots but words from other
languages, particularly French.

Beyond this, he is able to navigate the
idiomatic language of his pilgrim characters without debasing his high form. The language is
direct, emphatic and immediate, while still triumphing not just by evoking the literary muses,
but also in his high style particularly in the opening lines of the .