1 - The problem of the dark side of a love poet: an introduction and reassessment

Summary

Ever since the publication of the Délie in 1544, Maurice Scève has been considered by many readers and critics to be the most difficult, anguished, and perplexing love poet of the French Renaissance. The purpose of this book is to question our understanding of this long-standing critical view, one that has always been for me problematic and unsatisfying, and to offer another interpretive possibility which has to do with poetry, struggle, and the pursuit of love's paradise. I intend to explore how Scève's love lyrics, largely perceived as dark and anguished, can be associated with a more positive poetic tradition whose primary feature of struggle always accompanies intense, diaphoric poetic creations of light and life so essential to a transcendent paradisal perspective. I shall argue that it is Scève's primary quest to come to terms with and portray the ineffable that constitutes the central and unifying concern of his love lyrics. This study runs counter to the prevailing critical view of Scève as a poet painfully preoccupied with the lamentation of unrequited love. It offers instead the view of Scève as a remarkable and persevering and successful poet of the ineffable intent on giving a more positive, higher meaning to the love experience and its expression.