The term “poet laureate” conjures a pleasant image of mutual love and respect between poetry and the state, or more personally, between poet and ruler. In poetic terms, Dryden paid powerful homage to Chaucer as a foundational and generative poet in the English tradition. He certainly seems to have believed that Chaucer occupied the position of poet laureate. When Chaucer is claimed as a poet laureate, it seems to represent an emotional investment in wanting to see his work recognized at a high level. There is also another sense in which Chaucer was described as “laureate” in the fifteenth century. Many of Chaucer's followers portrayed him in this way to acknowledge and praise the “golden” or “illuminated” quality of his English writing. He is praised as such by his followers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and there seems to be a curious conflation between “aureate” or “golden” high style and the “laureate” ethos.