And the winner is . . .

Virginia's inspiration of a Chaucer contest to stimulate interest in the first great poet of the English language had a successful conclusion. The New Chaucer Society (NCS) spring newsletter announced the competition. Both scholars and students submitted entries limited to one page (500 words). Submissions answered the question, "Why, after 600 years, are we still studying the works of Chaucer?" The entry of Robert Meyer-Lee, a graduate student at Yale, won the prize. Based on two lines from "Pilgrim" Chaucer's intro to the Tale of Thopas, here is what he wrote:

"The Allure of the Phantom Popet"

This were a popet in an arm t'embrace

For any womman, smal and fair of face.

This couplet, spoken by the redoubtable host of the Canterbury Tales about the poet's own pilgrim alter-ego, is, in the fullest sense of the word, charming. Endearingly elusive, it captures in its thematic play and formal sprezzatura [studied nonchalance] the essential reason why, after 600 years, we are still so interested in--and so mystified by--Chaucer's poetry. The lines are at once self-deprecating, self-aggrandizing, and self-effacing. Apparently submitting himself to the mockery of the host, the poet is in fact ostentatiously making his own person the topic of his verse--only to leave us with both a remarkably concrete image and an utter befuddlement as to what the image ultimately suggests. Does he intend it to be a faithful self-depiction, or merely another example of the host's crude and sometimes cruel jocularity? Is his affection a reinforcement of gender stereotypes, or, by placing both himself and woman in opposition to the voice of the host, an ironized subversion of these stereotypes? These and countless other questions exist, however, only in the readerly aftermath of the couplet. Initially, we seem to gain such an intimacy with the author that we, too, wish to embrace him. Only upon reflection may we feel completely hoodwinked into this desire. Once again we have been nudged into mistaking fiction for presence, and, despairing of discovering the latter, we interrogate the former. We unearth dramatic complexity. We notice that underneath the apparently natural, colloquial speech of these lines is a virtually flawless iambic pentameter. And yet, finally, what we most relish is the initial trickery, and behind this we imagine once more an authorial presence--precisely that "elvysh" personality that forms the other half of the host's characterization of the narrator. Like the prodigal son, we return, wiser and wizened, to the scene of our former interpretive innocence. I may be accused in this appreciation of focusing too narrowly on the immanent qualities of Chaucer's verse, failing to call attention, for example, to the immense cultural importance of his work as revealed by not only the texts themselves but also by the institutions that perpetuate their canonicity. Certainly, we continue to study Chaucer's works because we believe we may understand better the anglophone cultures which they both represent and have helped to produce, and--just as certainly if more cynically--because we have already invested so much in this study. Yet I believe that the fundamental reason we remain drawn to Chaucer is the magnetic sense of authorial presence that lurks around the corners of the verse. Over and over this presence reveals itself to be an illusion, yet we cannot make it go away, and the more we pursue it the more it eludes our grasp.

The prize was awarded in London, the site of the NCS conference in 2000.

A few years later, when the NCS met at the University of Boulder in Colorado, Meyer-Lee and I, as members, both attended their annual conference. He was a young professor by then. In reflecting on the essay, he said how much he enjoyed thinking about it. "It brought me the greatest financial compensation per word than anything else I've written!"

Here is a personal recollection of mine from the Boulder conference. I found myself in a room full of professors and graduate students, and took the opportunity to ask a question about the Thopas story. "Why, in these days when obscenity is accepted and even encouraged, why, when Chaucer says 'pricking' do the notes continue to advise, as they have for generations, that he means galloping or spurring?" (Pricking is the main activity in the story. Everyone in the room knew that.) One older gentleman allowed that the word may not have been a sexual referent when Chaucer lived. (The MED, however, offers intercourse as a possibility.) Galloping surely dulls down the flavor of the potentially spicy Tale. And, oddly enough, the horse and horse riding are a sexual convention dating back to biblical times. Pilgrim Chaucer does not tell an exceedingly foolish story, as is generally maintained. Instead, he tells the raciest story in the collection. Beyond the gentleman's comment, no one had any more to say. How status quo.

So where is Meyer-Lee now?  This year Robert Meyer-Lee is the Margaret W. Pepperdene Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at Agnes Scott College, a women's college in Decatur, GA near Atlanta.  He is on leave from his usual campus, Indiana University at South Bend, where he is an Associate Professor of English listed as Bobby Meyer Lee.

He is academically well prepared.

B. A., Williams College

M. A. New York University

Ph.D., Yale University

His "Teaching and Scholarly Interests" are described on the Indiana University website as specializing in early English literature, especially the literature of the late medieval period, from about 1350 through the early 1500s. In his teaching, he seeks to foster students' appreciation of both the familiarity and strangeness of these early texts, and how their very distance from us fruitfully complicates such basic questions about the literary enterprise as: what is literature, what do we claim to be its value and function, and how well, in practice, it lives up to these ideals. Such questions also lurk within his scholarly interest with his published work addressing topics ranging from the relations of poetry and political power in the 1400s to the theoretical and practical implications of the way modern editors have put together Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

     You can find Meyer-Lee's name on Amazon as author of Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt, published by Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature. It appears he continues to be a "winner" to this day.