Poetic Love.
- Author / Editor
- Broadbent, J. B.
Poetic Love.
- Published
- London: Chatto & Windus, 1964.
- Physical Description
- [x]. 310 pp.
- Description
- Studies the Christian and Platonic underpinnings of romantic love in Renaissance drama and poetry, exploring its roots in courtly traditions, and distinguishing it from love depicted by Augustan, Romantic, and modern writers. A section on Chaucer (pp. 42-56) maintains that Chaucer's depiction of courtly sentiment advances "Petrarchan 'technique'" by testing courtly conventions and human nature "against each other." KnT demonstrates the success of religious love over "realist" love, while Troilus's idealism in TC is counterpointed by the practical outlooks of Pandarus, Diomede, and Criseyde. The Marriage Group of CT explores "more complex and mature loves in order to "comment on life": WBT "symbolizes" the teller's "deepest need for a man with enough erotic force to love her into beauty"; the envoy of ClT provides "therapeutic irony" to redeem the ludicrous impracticality of the Tale; and in FranT Dorigen and Arveragus "preserve in marriage the freedom and regard of romantic love" while also preserving "marriage itself against romantic dangers."
- Chaucer Subjects
- Knight and His Tale
Troilus and Criseyde
Wife of Bath and Her Tale
Clerk and His Tale
Franklin and His Tale