In 1694, the young Joseph Addison, later a playwright, essayist and notorious strander of prepositions, published ‘An Account of the Greatest English Poets’ in the fourth part of John Dryden's Miscellany Poems. A verse account of the visitation of the Muses (‘the Tuneful Nine’) to writers of ‘British Rhimes’ past and present, it nominates Geoffrey Chaucer as the first great poet in the English tradition:

Despite alighting only briefly on Chaucer's encounter with the Muses, Addison's account is densely packed rhetorically and conceptually. In a few lines it discloses much about the conflicted way in which the late medieval poet was regarded, both as a comic writer and as an early English writer, in the ‘long eighteenth century’, a period spanning the late seventeenth century through to the end of the eighteenth. It contains a number of conceptual contradictions which, as will be explored throughout this chapter, reflect the variable nature of Chaucer reception throughout the so-called ‘Age of Wit’.