Who were the main writers during the age of Chaucer and list one of their literary works?

Chaucer
(ca. 1343€“1400) often called the "father" of English poetry because he chose to write
in the vernacular, more specifically, the Englishof southern England and London, was surrounded
by writers, both in England and the Continent, whose works bridged the period between
medievalism and what became known as the Renaissance.

In addition to Dante
Alighieri (The Divine Comedy, ca. 1308€“21), Giovanni Boccaccio
(The Decameron, ca. 1353), and Guillaume de Machaut (Le Remede de
Fortune, ca. 1361greatly admired by Chaucer), all of whom provided Continental
inspiration and models for Chaucer's work, Chaucer's contemporaries in England were turning out
works of profound importance to the English literary canon and the development of modern
English.

The writer known as the Pearl Poet (ca. 1360€“1400), whose work
included the dream vision poem, Pearl, and the Arthurian romance
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, was writing in highly-alliterative verse
in a West-Midland dialectin a sense, looking backward from Chaucernevertheless provided Chaucer
with a familiar genre for his own dream vision poems in , House of Fame,
and Parliament of Fowls.

At about
this time, William Langland (ca. 1332€“1400) wrote The Vision of William Concerning
Piers the Plowman (ca. 1362€“1387), another dream vision, a satiric view of late
medieval secular and religious society couched in an allegorical framework that puzzles scholars
and readers today because it is, to be quite blunt, sometimes readable and sometimes maddeningly
obscure. Langland uses unrhymed alliterative verse, unlike the Pearl Poet, whose alliterative
verse has a highly-structured rhyme scheme. Despite its sometimes confusing narrative structure,
Piers Plowman is considered one of the most important works of the late
fourteenth century.

John Gower (ca. 1330€“1408), who was once ranked as equal
to Chaucer, is now generally considered to be at least a half-step below Chaucer as a poet, but
Chaucer himself referred to Gower as "moral Gower" because some of Gower's workssuch
as Vox Clamantis ("The Voice of One Crying")addressed social
upheavals within English society (for example, The Peasant's Revolt of 1381). Gower's most
well-known work, however, Confessio Amantis (The Confession of a
Lover), is both a critical look at English society and religion and a series of tales
not unlike some of Chaucer's moral examples in .

As we can see, among Continental and English writers in the fourteenth
century, there were several writers whose works clearly influenced Chaucer or provided ideas for
subject matter. Models of the dream vision, for example, which Chaucer used extensively
throughout his own works, were highly developed by the mid-fourteenth century, perhaps achieving
their greatest expression in Chaucer.