6 - “De mes trauaulx me bienheurantz ma peine”: love poetry as therapy

Summary

The illumination and malleability of mind and matter and art in the Délie as I have been exploring them in the preceding chapters have profound therapeutic significance for the poet. Whenever the mind and body of poetic contemplation (i.e., esprit and sens as Baudelaire called them, or else idée and forme sensible to use Valéry's terms) are viewed apart, antagonistic, warring, the perspective and poetics of anguish, obscurity, hell assert themselves. However, with the union and unity of mind and matter come the opposite perspective and poetics: that of paradise. Scève's vision and art were, finally, pliant enough and constructive enough to accommodate such a paradise. The psychological and artistic health of the latter is what Scève truly strives towards, a therapeutic process which is a creative response to and progression through the state of disorder of the former poetic possibility. Most great poets and writers and especially love poets have recognized this process and gone, some much farther than others, in the aesthetic direction I have been describing in this book. The distance covered in this enlightened progress of love and art can be quite far – it can range from hell to paradise – but it almost always begins in hell.