The Idiom of Love: Love Poetry from the Early Sonnets to the Seventeenth Century

Poems about love need not be autobiographical. But as an expression of the purest form of emotion, the poet necessarily draws both on his own experience and on a lyrical canon. This book makes a return to the origins of the canon of European love poetry, starting with Petrarch's influential imagery of irreconcilable opposites, and tracing its development in the work of its most brilliant 16th- and 17th-century exponents. Starting with Dante, Petrarch and the origins of love poetry, the book describes how the Pleiade, using Roman antiquity as its guide, forged the identity of the poet. At the same time in England, Shakespeare withdrew love poetry from the public eye, creating the intimacy of love, and Donne revelled in the positive aspect of love between a man and a woman. Racine, treating love as a subject of drama, spelled the end of his era by his return to Petrarch's anguish about love as the inescapable corruption of the human condition. This book on shared European sources of poetry should enable specialists to see their own studies in a new context and provide students and lovers of poetry with a powerful view of one of the most inspiring periods in European literature.