Geoffrey Chaucer's collection of stories in poetic form is called which work?

• A. Beowulf
• B. Canterbury Tales
• C. The Decameron
• D. The Faerie Queene

Answer: (B)

The main idea here is a frame narrative: a group of travelers on a pilgrimage share stories with each other, and those tales make up the whole work. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales fits this mold because it presents a collection of stories told in verse by different characters as they travel to Canterbury. Written in Middle English, the tales are all poetic, not prose, and they cover a wide range of voices, genres, and satirical angles, linked together by the journey and the storytelling contest at the Tabard Inn.

That’s why it’s the right match for “a collection of stories in poetic form” by Chaucer. By contrast, Beowulf is an Old English epic poem about a single hero; The Decameron is a group of prose tales told by people during a plague; The Faerie Queene is an epic allegorical poem, not a set of stories told within a frame narrative.