The poet in love
Love undoubtedly ranks first among the sentiments and values that have once inspired poets. Yet in ancient cultures, such as those of the Hebrews, Greeks, or Romans, a man's passion for a woman was less frequently the subject of poetry than, perhaps, it was in medieval Europe. More popular was the comradeship that occurred among warriors (as in Homer's Iliad between the Greek heroes Achilles and Patroclus), or an abstract love of a philosophic ideal. Women were usually viewed as inferior. For example, in Hebrew literature, it is Eve who brings sin into the world and Delilah who betrays Samson, the hero.
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| Illustration to Romance of the Rose, 13th-century French Poem in which the medieval idealization of women reaches its height. |
The poems of the troubadours were usually about, or relatively close, real women (court ladies). But these women were portrayed as divine entities whose beauty and goodness influenced the great deeds of knights and heroes as well as poetry. This propensity to idealize women and the passion of love persisted among later middle-age poets. The Physical and the Divine. To the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti of the 13th century, passion is the "perfection's source" And Dante * submitted a number of poems to his Beatrice in which she appears as his perfect woman conception.
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| Greek vase painting (fifth century B.C.) shows Achilles, the hero of Homer's Illiad, dressing Patroclus' wounds. |
This attitude towards women and marriage was slowly replaced by a more rational one. Throughout England's 16th-century verse, modern idealism had a longer life, partially due to Queen Elizabeth's adulation of poets of the period. Yet by the end of the century, women started to feature as individual beings rather than as concepts, even in English poetry. For example, William Shakespeare defined the woman he loved in this way:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:...
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
Posts tended to compose poetry of love in the following years, celebrating the attractiveness of their women, regretting their fickleness, or detailing the signs of the relationship. Some of these women seem extremely attractive or healthy, as when Robert Burns * started a poem:
O, my Luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June:
0, my Luve's like the melodie
That's sweetly play'd in tune.
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| As a love token, Nicholas Hilliard's miniature portrait of a young man includes roses--a favored love symbol in Elizabethan English poetry. |
But Burns's song's sheer exuberance and charisma more than makeup for its potential deductions from the reality. In the 20th century, it is the nature of human life that most poets are concerned with, and particularly sexual life. Previous generations 'inhibitions and taboos have been mostly torn down, and the contemporary poet seeks to examine (full and specifically) the essence of his emotions about the woman he loves. The certain love poetry of the 20th century has always been a romantic and nostalgic one, much of America's E. E. Cummings * poems; but it has appeared to be more realistic, intimate and truthful in recent years, like the love poems of the young English poet Thom Gunn or the American poet Kenneth Rexroth.
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| Pierre Bonnard made appropriate lithographs for a verse by Paul Verlaine.(1844-96) |
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