Love has always had its critics. They range far and wide throughout history, from Plato and the Neoplatonists, to the Rabbinic and Christian interpreters of the Song of Songs, from the clerics behind the savage Albigensian Crusade, to the seventeenth-century English Puritan author William Prynne, who never met a joy he failed to condemn. Love has never lacked for those who try to tame it for “higher” purposes, or those who would argue that “the worst evils have been committed in the name of love”.¹ At the same time, love has always had its passionate defenders, though these have more...

Susan Sontag, in her now-classic essay “Against Interpretation”, protests against a form of criticism which reshapes texts like the Song of Songs into new and ideologically compliant forms:

Interpretation […] presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering...

After Virgil and Ovid, the poetry of love begins to fade into the background of the literary scene. Many of the later Latin poets, like Claudian and Sidonius of the late fourth and the fifth centuries, follow Lucan rather than Ovid, in a poetic tradition that puts love aside entirely: “Lucan’s poem, programmatically, declares the absence of ‘love’ at the outset. TheBellum Civilehas no ‘love’. It does not have anIliadicpart […] or anOdysseanpart. It has only war”.¹ Lucan’s epicThe Civil War(orPharsalia) is a lengthy account of the defeat of Pompey the...

In Erich Auerbach’s view, “for the Provençal poets and the [Italian] poets of the new style [dolce stil novovv], ‘high love’ was the only major theme”.¹ Speaking ofdie hohe Minne(what French scholars callamour courtois, and English scholars “courtly love”), Auerbach gives voice to a critical consensus that over the last century-and-a half has dominated our understanding of the origins and development of western love poetry. Both the consensus, and Auerbach, are wrong.

Start with adultery. Start, at least, with the idea of adultery. Breaking the rules, doing something you are not supposed to do. Doing someoneyou...

The brief flowering of the troubadours helps us to understand the love story, in twelfth-century Paris, of Peter Abelard and Heloise d’Argenteuil, who lived the passions and the dangers often spoken of in the poetry of the age. The letters between Abelard and Heloise are among the world’s most vibrant embodiments offin’amor,¹ as well as its most tragic testaments to the violence and determination of those who would prevent men and women from living and loving as they choose. Written around 1128, this Latin correspondence tells a story of love that is both of the body and the mind....

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, everything changed. In its earliest days, the mood in Provençe was ebullient and defiant. It radiates from the tale ofAucassin et Nicolette, which, though written in the northern dialect of Picardy, “gives a faithful picture”¹ of the attitudes held in Occitania—sensual, anticlerical, and fiercely independent:

In Paradise what would I do? I do not seek to enter there, but only wish for Nicolette, my sweet friend that I love so much. For no one goes to Paradise except the kinds of people I will tell you about now: there is where...

Despite the changes that are beginning to appear in fourteenth-century England, by the same time in Italy the sublimation and spiritualization of love has long established itself as the dominant theme of European poetry, a theme that is exported to England in the sixteenth century, briefly sweeping aside much of the spirit we have seen developing in Chaucer. To understand how and why this happened, we will have to circle back and spend a little time with Plato.

Perhaps the single most basic element of Platonic metaphysical thought is the separation between the world we see and the world we...

The true recovery of the troubadour tradition comes with Shakespeare, the poet and playwright who “towers like a mountain peak above the surrounding foothills, but is one substance and structure with them”.¹ Most truly “of the English strain”, Shakespeare’s sonnets are a reversing, even a mocking of the Petrarchan mode and the Neoplatonic sublimation of passion into worship that sometimes marks the poetry of Sidney. Rather than treating the individual as a means to an end, the lowest rung on the ladder of love, Shakespeare’s sonnets reverse this emphasis, valuing the individual as an end in itself, not a means...

The theme of love as resistance to authority is transformed and amplified in the lyric poetry of John Donne and Robert Herrick. In work filled with a sense of the fragility and shortness of life, these poets contribute to an ethos that has come to be known by the namecarpe diem, a phrase made famous by Horace, “who in Ode, I. xi, tells his mistress that […] life is short, so they must ‘enjoy the day’, for they do not know if there will be a tomorrow”.¹ Horace’s line, “carpe diem quam minimum credula postero”² (“Seize the day, put...

To choose is not so easy as it sounds. “All choice is frightening, when one thinks about it: a terrifying liberty, unguided by a greater duty”.¹ Choices open some doors, while closing others. New lives, new possibilities, often come at the expense of other lives now foreclosed or lost. The wages ofchoiceare death, as every life leads, eventually, to that ending that may be the only true universal of the human experience—not the understanding or the experience of the end, but the physical cessation itself, the transition from animate to inert, from you to it. Authority figures...

Over fifty years ago, Susan Sontag described “the project of interpretation” as “largely reactionary, stifling”, and placed it in the context of “a culture whose […] dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capacity”, before concluding that “interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art”.¹ The situation does not seem to have improved in the intervening half-century. As Martin Paul Eve has very recently observed, “traditional literary criticismalways coercestexts into new narrative forms”, as “its practitioners [read] to seek case studies suited for exegetic purpose”.² To come back to the...