John Lydgate
#9,230
Most Influential Person Across History
English monk and poet
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Literature
Why Is John Lydgate Influential?
(Suggest an Edit or Addition)According to Wikipedia, John Lydgate of Bury was an English monk and poet, born in Lidgate, near Haverhill, Suffolk, England. Lydgate's poetic output is prodigious, amounting, at a conservative count, to about 145,000 lines. He explored and established every major Chaucerian genre, except such as were manifestly unsuited to his profession, like the fabliau. In the Troy Book , an amplified translation of the Trojan history of the thirteenth-century Latin writer Guido delle Colonne, commissioned by Prince Henry , he moved deliberately beyond Chaucer's Knight's Tale and his Troilus, to provide a full-scale epic.