The Chaucer Review: An Indexed Bibliography (Vols. 1-30)

Stephens, John. "The Uses of Personae and the Art of Obliqueness in Some Chaucer Lyrics: Part I." 21 (1987): 360-73.
Even in poems where Chaucer does not write in a persona named "Geoffrey" or in a personified narrator, he distances himself from the speaker. Chaucer indicates this separation in several ways. In "Complaint unto Pity" he creates an ambiguous situation for which he makes a conventional narrator. Such conformity suggests the fictional basis of the narrator. In "Fortune" the speakers are delineated by the debate genre of the poem. Verb tense can also suggest a speaker separate from the poet.