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Idiom of Love: Love Poetry from the Early Sonnets to the Seventeenth Century
Idiom of Love Love Poetry from the Early Sonnets to the Seventeenth Century Author:Judy Sproxton Of all types of literature, why does love poetry affect us so deeply? The Idiom of Love explores particular ways in which love has been conceived and expressed in Western Europe, from the invention fo the sonnet in the thirteenth century until the seventeenth-century tragedies of Jean Racine. The sonnet sparked a new fashion in the composition... more » of a literature of personal intimacy, designed to be read silently. It gave scope for the individual writer to draw on personal experience, in all its paradoxes and ironies; it engendered a new tradition in lyrical verse. In subsequent centuries, the expression of love developed in many ways. Judy Sproxton discusses the differences in the accounts of love to be found in the work of writers as distinctive as Petrarch and Donne. She shows how the idiom of love became an idiom of life, referring to the dimensions of existence which, like love, often enforce a confrontation with the self. This book is directed at the interests and curiosity of the general reader. Its compression is of great value. Each chapter provides a compelling insight into poems sometimes unknown, but often as familiar as the more famous sonnets of Shakespeare. These are now illuminated by the clarity of Judy Sproxtons perspective.« less