Before he became the famous poet of the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer had already cut his teeth on the wildly popular medieval genre of the dream-vision. He’d also written what’s been called the first novel in English, his beautiful and heart-wrenching Troilus and Criseyde. And he’d renounced that love poem as unfair to women. Did he mean that apology, offered as it was under threat of cancelation? What can twenty-first century readers learn about the origins of English literature from reading these early poems of the “father” of our literary tradition—those he treasured and those he repudiated, possibly under duress? While our emphasis will fall on the poet's tender (though often arch) portrayal of the trauma (and drama) of love, we will also turn at semester’s end to one early fan who agreed that, when it came to sex and the sexes, Chaucer had basically gotten it all wrong.