in the darkness prest, From his own soul by worldly weights, ...
the greatest poem then known to modern Europe, and the most imaginative ever written.

Thus the Italian sky was blazing with splendor, while the West was still in the morning twilight.

The Divina Commedia was written half a century before the Canterbury Tales.
Boccaccio was then writing his _Filostrato_, which was to be Chaucer's model in the Troilus and Creseide, and his _Decameron_, which suggested the plan of the Canterbury Tales.

His _Teseide_ is also said to be the original of the Knight's Tale.

Petrarch, "the worthy clerke" from whom Chaucer is said to have learned a story or two in Italy for his great work, was born in 1304, and was also a star of the first magnitude in that Italian galaxy.
Indeed, it is here worthy of a passing remark, that from that early time to a later period, many of the great products of English poetry have been watered by silver rills of imaginative genius from a remote Italian source.