Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The problem of the dark side of a love poet: an introduction and reassessment
- 2 In search of love's epistemology: affirming the role of the creative imagination
- 3 Embodying the sacred and ineffable: poetic forms of transcendence and paradise
- 4 Becoming what one sees: the unity and identity of poetic self
- 5 Struggle, light, and love's “sainct lieu”
- 6 “De mes trauaulx me bienheurantz ma peine”: love poetry as therapy
- Epilogue Scève, Mallarmé, and the art of transcendence
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in French
6 - “De mes trauaulx me bienheurantz ma peine”: love poetry as therapy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The problem of the dark side of a love poet: an introduction and reassessment
- 2 In search of love's epistemology: affirming the role of the creative imagination
- 3 Embodying the sacred and ineffable: poetic forms of transcendence and paradise
- 4 Becoming what one sees: the unity and identity of poetic self
- 5 Struggle, light, and love's “sainct lieu”
- 6 “De mes trauaulx me bienheurantz ma peine”: love poetry as therapy
- Epilogue Scève, Mallarmé, and the art of transcendence
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in French
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Love Aesthetics of Maurice ScèvePoetry and Struggle, pp. 137 - 149Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991