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Jewish Parody and Allegory in Medieval Hebrew Poetry in Spain

Libby Garshowitz

in The Convergence of Judaism and Islam: Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions

The benefits reaped by the Jews under Arab Islam at its zenith through the enrichment of medieval Hebrew and poetic creativity—infused by Arab poetry—compares well with the progress they made in ... More

The benefits reaped by the Jews under Arab Islam at its zenith through the enrichment of medieval Hebrew and poetic creativity—infused by Arab poetry—compares well with the progress they made in science and the professions. This is lucidly corroborated by this chapter where the text refers to Andalusia (Spain) as the place this decisive encounter took place. This discussion is focused on the transmission of Arabic culture in Hebrew guise into the Jewish communities of twelfth-century Christendom. Of particular importance is the love poetry of Jacob ben Elazar (c. 1170–1235), author of a ten-chapter collection of love stories composed in about 1233. The chapter singles out Chaptes 7 and 9 and points out that Jacob ben Elazar's poetry testifies to his “virtuosity and adroitness in the Hebrew language” and the contribution of Arabic poetry in this context.Less

Other Supposedly Solomonic Books: Song of Songs and Qohelet

David M. Carr

in The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction

This chapter adopts criteria developed in chapter 15 (on Proverbs) to assess the extent to which two other purportedly Solomonic books, Song of Songs and Qohelet, might contain early pre-exilic ... More

This chapter adopts criteria developed in chapter 15 (on Proverbs) to assess the extent to which two other purportedly Solomonic books, Song of Songs and Qohelet, might contain early pre-exilic materials. The conclusion is that the evidence for this is better for Song of Songs than for Qohelet. Though elements of Song of Songs may have been added over time, it shows unambivalent dependence on New Kingdom period Egyptian love poetry, and appears to have been the source of several formulations found in Hosea and Deuteronomy. In contrast, the main link of Qohelet to a demonstrable non-Israelite tradition, its links to the song of the alewife in the Old Babylonian edition of Gilgamesh, is relatively isolated. In addition, Qohelet’s orientation to monarchal institutions and other indicators suggest a more likely post-exilic date.Less

The Cloistered Passion of Radha and Krishna

Sudhir Kakar and John Munder Ross

in Tales of Love, Sex, and Danger

This chapter focuses on the paradigmatic love story of Radha and Krishna, widely considered in Hindu cultural imagination as a parable of the human longing for and union with God. The liaison of ... More

This chapter focuses on the paradigmatic love story of Radha and Krishna, widely considered in Hindu cultural imagination as a parable of the human longing for and union with God. The liaison of Radha and Krishna has been portrayed in thousands of exquisite miniature paintings depicting the lovers in separation and union, longing and abandonment. The legend is not a narrative in the sense of an orderly progression whose protagonists have a shared past and are progressing towards a tragic and happy future. Tender and cheerful, and not tragic, it is rather an evocation and elaboration of the here-and-now of passion. While the figures of Radha and Krishna are linked to the heroine and hero of classical love poetry in many ways, they are primarily products of the bhakti movement, which is known for its erotic mood.Less

Lingua franca: The International Language of Love

Ardis Butterfield

in The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War

This chapter develops the argument of Chapter 5 by comparing groups of ballades, written in both English, French and Anglo‐French, on the continent and on the island, specifically composed in the ... More

This chapter develops the argument of Chapter 5 by comparing groups of ballades, written in both English, French and Anglo‐French, on the continent and on the island, specifically composed in the ‘international’ language of love. Reading across and between Machaut, Froissart, Chaucer, Gower, and Graunson, teaches us to move on from the notion of source and ‘original’, or impersonal intertextuality, towards a much more flexible sense of love poetry as a deeply and multiply layered linguistic process, that passes from a large area of mutual self‐reference up through to examples of individual retorts and ripostes. Such a process cannot be easily characterized as ‘English’ or ‘French’: instead, poets are working with a much less rigid notion of linguistic — and literary — difference.Less

‘Now Shall I Make My Soul’: Approaching Death in Yeats’s Life and Work: Warton Lecture on English Poetry

R. F. Foster

in Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 151, 2006 Lectures

This lecture traces W. B. Yeats' preoccupation with the changing forms of death throughout his life, from his fin-de-siécle love-poetry to his poems of death. These poems of death were linked to his ... More

This lecture traces W. B. Yeats' preoccupation with the changing forms of death throughout his life, from his fin-de-siécle love-poetry to his poems of death. These poems of death were linked to his interest in Celtic legend, Irish intellectual influences and conjunctions, and magical ritual and psychic research. The lecture considers Yeats' approach to death in his later work, concluding with his creation of a structured canon of work in the light of his own death and the work that he wrote on his deathbed.Less

Change and the Donne Generation

Robert Ellrodt

in Seven Metaphysical Poets: A Structural Study of the Unchanging Self

New attitudes and a new style characterized the poetry of John Donne, who often took the lead in innovation and distinctly expressed his own personality as well as the temper and dominant ... More

New attitudes and a new style characterized the poetry of John Donne, who often took the lead in innovation and distinctly expressed his own personality as well as the temper and dominant inclinations of his own generation. The poets of the Donne generation rejected the floridness, mellifluousness, and melodiousness of ‘golden’ verse and ‘sugared’ sonnets. The search for manly attitudes and the ‘manly style’, related to a search for truth and meaning, was, indeed, the dominant trend in the Donne generation. It accounts for the change of mood and expression in love poetry. In literary expression a desire of change for the sake of change (a desire paraded in Donne's elegy so entitled) was a prominent feature of this generation. In their cult of wit the poets of the Donne generation were interested in new forms of wit, displayed in the epigram, the paradox, and the rhetorical figures that create surprise and call for a quick apprehension of thought.Less

Plath's Poetry and Fiction

Luke Ferretter

in Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A Critical Study

This chapter discusses the relationship between the poetry and the fiction that Plath was writing at the same time during the different periods of her creative career. The first section examines the ... More

This chapter discusses the relationship between the poetry and the fiction that Plath was writing at the same time during the different periods of her creative career. The first section examines the poetry and fiction of 1954–55, in which Plath deals with the unresolved pain of childhood events in her fiction, but with the more complex pain of love in her poetry. This greater complexity continues in the poetry she writes whilst working on her first novel Falcon Yard in 1957. The women of Plath's fiction are much more in control of their relationships to men than the women of her poetry. During her Cambridge period, her fiction deals more explicitly with the politics of relationship, as a comparison between her story ‘The Wishing Box’ and her poems on imagination and reality show. As she begins to write some of her finest short fiction in Boston, however, a greater psychological complexity emerges in stories such as ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ than in the psychological poems of the same period. Finally, a comparison of the few poems Plath wrote whilst writing The Bell Jar and of the many she wrote whilst writing Double Exposure shed light on the concerns of those novels.Less

Petrarch, Scholarship, and Traditions of Love Poetry

Peter Mack

in Reading Old Books: Writing with Traditions

This chapter focuses on Petrarch's (1304–1374) own poetry in order to articulate what he achieved and how he used his sources. In returning to the source, the chapter reveals how good Petrarch's ... More

This chapter focuses on Petrarch's (1304–1374) own poetry in order to articulate what he achieved and how he used his sources. In returning to the source, the chapter reveals how good Petrarch's poems are and how much their excellence owes to his subtle and restrained exploitation of the tradition of his poetic predecessors. It begins by considering the advice which Petrarch gives scholars and writers about imitation and the ways of using one's reading in order to write. He was aware of the role which his own work might play as a model for other writers, and he advised them on how to use their reading. Drawing on previous scholarship, the chapter makes some connections between his Italian poems and what he says about his life in the collections of letters which he constructed and in his Secretum. Then it looks at some examples of Petrarch's poems, both to substantiate a claim about their excellence and to show how that excellence derives from his creative use of his reading. Finally, the chapter considers his attitude to Dante, his immediate and overwhelming forerunner, and discusses the ways in which later writers used Petrarch's work.Less

Private Stuff and Public Spirit

Bonnie Costello

in The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others

This chapter looks at some of the ways the “we” of love poetry expands to perform a civil or didactic function, and it connects this function to the puzzle of love's number, tense, and grammar, which ... More

This chapter looks at some of the ways the “we” of love poetry expands to perform a civil or didactic function, and it connects this function to the puzzle of love's number, tense, and grammar, which constitutes the subject matter of many love poems. Plato argued that eros could be a rung on the ladder to other forms of love. Love's number may involve not only addition but also an exponential process, in sublimation “mounting upwards from one to two, and from two to all fair forms.” But a great deal of thinking since has set romantic love at odds, not only with truth and reason, but with social and ethical thinking. Later philosophers saw romantic love as exclusive and private, indifferent or even hostile to the world beyond itself and inscrutable to that world.Less

Dante and the Lyric Past

Teodolinda Barolini

in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture

Dante is heir to a complex and lively Italian lyric tradition that had its roots in the Provencal poetry nourished by the rivalling courts of twelfth-century southern France. The conventions of ... More

Dante is heir to a complex and lively Italian lyric tradition that had its roots in the Provencal poetry nourished by the rivalling courts of twelfth-century southern France. The conventions of troubadour love poetry—based on the notion of the lover's feudal service to “midons” (Italian, Madonna), his lady, from whom he expects a “guerdon” (Italian, guiderdone), or reward—were successfully transplanted to the court of Frederick II in Palermo. Palermo became the capital of the first group of Italian vernacular lyric poets, the so-called Sicilian School; the centralized imperial court did not offer a suitable venue for the transplantation of Provence's contentious political poetry, which was left behind.Less

Turning Inward

Ann Moss

in Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn

This chapter provides an exploration of ‘self-narration’. The chapter concentrates on love poetry, a kind of discourse in which the first person pronoun predominates and turns attention on itself. ... More

This chapter provides an exploration of ‘self-narration’. The chapter concentrates on love poetry, a kind of discourse in which the first person pronoun predominates and turns attention on itself. Other literary works that are discussed in this chapter are prayers, hymns, and even sermons.Less

Amorous Discourse and ‘Bolts of Annihilation’ in the American Poems

in Tony Harrison and The Holocaust

This chapter examines the treatment of the Holocaust in the love poetry of Tony Harrison. It suggests that Harrison follows that of historicist writing about love that explores its function in the ... More

This chapter examines the treatment of the Holocaust in the love poetry of Tony Harrison. It suggests that Harrison follows that of historicist writing about love that explores its function in the past and its relevance to the present. It considers the influence of Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse on Harrison's amorous poems and suggests that his account of the amorous in the context of the atomic era is a synthesis of sex and the Cold War. This chapter analyses some of his relevant works including The Bedbug, The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe and The Curtain Catullus and describes the amorous presence in his so-called American poems.Less

Introduction: “They Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage?”

Katherine Wasdin

in Eros at Dusk: Ancient Wedding and Love Poetry

The introduction lays necessary factual and theoretical groundwork for the chapters to follow by describing the social contexts of the ancient wedding and love affair. The wedding is a markedly ... More

The introduction lays necessary factual and theoretical groundwork for the chapters to follow by describing the social contexts of the ancient wedding and love affair. The wedding is a markedly erotic moment, but love affairs, while often sharing or borrowing the discourse of the wedding, are unlikely to end in marriage. Greek and Roman norms differ at times, but the literary tradition provides continuity across cultures. In both societies, the wedding is more eroticized than the marriage. The poems associated with the wedding and the affair can be classified as types of occasional verse, deeply connected with specific social contexts. They frequently allude to details of the wedding ritual or of the symposium and its aftermath to suggest verisimilitude. Interaction between poetic discourses therefore implies interaction between social occasions.Less

Polarized Debates, Ambivalent Judgments: The and the

Lewis Beer

in Machaut's Legacy: The Judgment Poetry Tradition in the Later Middle Ages and Beyond

This chapter aims to illustrate three simple points: first, that medieval love-debate poetry is centrally concerned with a conflict between idealism and pragmatism; second, that Machaut’s Jugement du ... More

This chapter aims to illustrate three simple points: first, that medieval love-debate poetry is centrally concerned with a conflict between idealism and pragmatism; second, that Machaut’s Jugement du roy de Behaigne foregrounds this aspect of the love-debate genre and explores its implications; and third, that Gower’s Confessio Amantis is also structured around the juxtaposition of idealistic and pragmatic views of love. While the two narrative poems may seem to distinguish themselves from earlier love-debates by “settling” the conflict presented with a conclusive judgment, they also retain the fundamental ambivalence of the un-concluded jeux-partis. Machaut and Gower invest sympathetically in the idea that worldly pleasures, and specifically the pleasures of love, can be idealized and given enduring value, and the energy and persistence of this fantasy constitute a significant part of these poems’ appeal. It is a fantasy nonetheless, because both poets also figure the attempt to align love with virtue as essentially futile.Less

Strategies of Abjection: Parrhēsia and the Cruel Beloved from Petrarch’s Canzoniere to Scève’s Délie

Cynthia N. Nazarian

in Love's Wounds: Violence and the Politics of Poetry in Early Modern Europe

This chapter analyzes Petrarch's Canzoniere alongside the first French Petrarchan sequence, Maurice Scève's Délie: Object de plus haulte vertu (1544). It examines Petrarch's wretchedness, isolation, ... More

This chapter analyzes Petrarch's Canzoniere alongside the first French Petrarchan sequence, Maurice Scève's Délie: Object de plus haulte vertu (1544). It examines Petrarch's wretchedness, isolation, and unrequited love to show how his suffering might be interpreted as productive, and more specifically how proclaiming his abjection serves to paradoxically strengthen and shield his voice. The chapter argues that the critical potential of Petrarch's position is rooted in his adaptation of classical parrhēsia, the ancient Greek trope of free, bold political speech. It also considers how Scève reshaped Petrarch's incorporeal, symbolic images of Cupid's arrows and the Beloved's gaze into an idiom of intensified violence that altered the terms of love poetry itself. It explains how Scève established a polarized schema that could channel contestation and insurrection from within the lover's wretchedness.Less

Grace and Beauty: Vittoria Colonna and Tullia d’Aragona

Ita Mac Carthy

in The Grace of the Italian Renaissance

This chapter considers whether court ladies required the same qualities as male courtiers. Grace, it turns out, is as vital for women of the court as it is for men, but womanly grace is more closely ... More

This chapter considers whether court ladies required the same qualities as male courtiers. Grace, it turns out, is as vital for women of the court as it is for men, but womanly grace is more closely linked to beauty and to what Italians today refer to as bella presenza than its manly counterpart. The chapter explores how two women authors, Vittoria Colonna and Tullia d'Aragona, sever the links that unite grace and beauty in male discourse. In Colonna's love poetry (ca. 1525–1535), grace resists semantic absorption into refined womanly appearances and rhetoric and turns, instead, towards spirituality that admits of no physical or corporeal manifestation. Tullia d'Aragona, by contrast, rejects the language of grace outright, identifying it as an impossible feminine standard, on the one hand, and perilously close to the language of sexual graces and favours, on the other. In her Rime (Poems) and Dialogo dell'infinità d'amore (Dialogue on the Infinity of Love) (both published in 1547), she identifies it as a word requiring sensitive handling, an instrument of control to flee from and a semantic trap set by men inclined in their treatment of women to the extremes of praise and blame.Less

Songs and Sonnets

Ramie Targoff

in John Donne, Body and Soul

Donne has long been celebrated as one of the great love poets of the English language. But what is it that distinguishes his love poetry, and why do we keep coming back to it? This chapter suggests ... More

Donne has long been celebrated as one of the great love poets of the English language. But what is it that distinguishes his love poetry, and why do we keep coming back to it? This chapter suggests that what distinguishes Donne as a love poet is at once the intensity of the pleasure he conveys in the moment of mutual love, and the ferocity with which he attempts to prolong that moment for as long as he can, knowing full well that its end may be near. In the Songs and Sonnets, he takes up the project of writing valedictory poems, but, in doing so, brings to the surface all of the anxieties that surround the task of bidding farewell and ensuring reunion through the medium of verse. It is in response to the fear of lovers' parting that the Songs and Sonnets are often most vital and alive, just as it is in response to the fear of death—when body and soul must part—that Donne's devotional verse becomes most animated. Indeed, Donne's attitude toward the bond between body and soul extends in crucial ways to his attitude toward the bond between two lovers.Less