Incorporating advances in historical linguistics but aimed at teachers
and students of poetry, Chaucer's Verse Art in its European Context
argues that between 1378 and 1400 Geoffrey Chaucer used his knowledge of
how poets versified in other languages to devise a meter that would be a
perfect fit for the newly respectable English. While Chaucer and Gower
are largely responsible for the last stage of this evolution in Middle
English and Anglo-Norman, Chaucer's risk in composing in English paid
off and iambic pentameter and tetrameter endured to become the staples
of English verse, while Gower's French stress-syllabic meters died with
the Anglo-Norman dialect.