Chaucer certainly presents himself as unlucky or unhappy in love, especially early in his career, in dream-vision poems such as The Book of the Duchess and The Parlement of Foules. In his poem, Chaucer passes the role of slightly comical unrequited lover on to Criseyde's uncle Pandarus, whose own desire seems to be displaced onto the sexual union of the younger lovers. For many decades in the twentieth century it was a truism that Chaucer began his poetic career as a more or less slavish imitator of French poetry, and as a devoted servant of rhetorical models and manuals such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria Nova. In an influential essay for the British Academy, J.M. Manly laid out the trajectory of Chaucer moving away from the “thin prettinesses” of the French tradition to a more robust and native poetic line.