M ICHAEL B RYSON AND A RPI M OVSESIAN From the Song of Songs to Shakespeare and Milton’s Eden Love and its Critics To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/611 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. Love and its Critics From the Song of Songs to Shakespeare and Milton’s Eden Michael Bryson and Arpi Movsesian https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2017 Michael Bryson and Arpi Movsesian This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). 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ISBN Paperback: 978–1-78374–348–3 ISBN Hardback: 978–1-78374–349–0 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978–1-78374–350–6 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978–1-78374–351–3 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978–1-78374–352–0 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0117 Cover image: Ary Scheffer, Dante and Virgil Encountering the Shades of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo in the Underworld (1855), Wikimedia, https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1855_ Ary_Scheffer_-_The_Ghosts_of_Paolo_and_Francesca_Appear_to_Dante_and_Virgil.jpg All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council(r)(FSC(r) certified. Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK) I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen: A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And Thou shalt not, writ over the door; So I turn’d to the Garden of Love, That so many sweet flowers bore. And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be: And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & desires. —William Blake, “The Garden of Love”, Songs of Experience Et si notre âme a valu quelque chose, c’est qu’elle a brûlé plus ardemment que quelques autres. —André Gide, Les Nourritures terrestres Die Wissenschaft unter der Optik des Künstlers zu sehn, die Kunst aber unter der des Lebens. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik Contents Acknowledgements ix A Note on Sources and Languages x 1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics 1 I. The Poetry of Love 1 II. Love’s Nemesis: Demands for Obedience 3 III. Love’s Critics: The Hermeneutics of Suspicion and the Authoritarian Approach to Criticism 10 IV. The Critics: Poetry Is About Poetry 23 V. The Critics: The Author Is Dead (or Merely Irrelevant) 29 2. Channeled, Reformulated, and Controlled: Love Poetry from the Song of Songs to Aeneas and Dido 37 I. Love Poetry and the Critics who Allegorize: The Song of Songs 37 II. Love Poetry and the Critics who Reduce: Ovid’s Amores and Ars Amatoria 57 III. Love or Obedience in Virgil: Aeneas and Dido 77 IV. Love or Obedience in Ovid: Aeneas, Dido, and the Critics who Dismiss 89 3. Love and its Absences in Late Latin and Greek Poetry 97 I. Love in the Poetry of Late Antiquity: Latin 97 II. Love in the Poetry of Late Antiquity: Greek 113 4. The Troubadours and Fin’amor : Love, Choice, and the Individual 121 I. Why “Courtly Love” Is Not Love 121 II. The Troubadours and Their Critics 136 III. The Troubadours and Love 165 5. Fin’amor Castrated: Abelard, Heloise, and the Critics who Deny 195 6. The Albigensian Crusade and the Death of Fin’amor in Medieval French and English Poetry 215 I. The Death of Fin’amor : The Albigensian Crusade and its Aftermath 215 II. Post- Fin’amor French Poetry: The Roman de la Rose 238 III. Post- Fin’amor English Romance: Love of God and Country in Havelok the Dane and King Horn 275 IV. Post- Fin’amor English Poetry: Mocking “Courtly Love” in Chaucer—the Knight and the Miller 280 V. Post- Fin’amor English Poetry: Mocking “Auctoritee” in Chaucer—the Wife of Bath 286 7. The Ladder of Love in Italian Poetry and Prose, and the Reactions of the Sixteenth-Century Sonneteers 295 I. The Platonic Ladder of Love 295 II. Post- Fin’amor Italian Poetry: The Sicilian School to Dante and Petrarch 300 III. Post- Fin’amor Italian Prose: Il Libro del Cortegiano ( The Book of the Courtier ) 330 IV. The Sixteenth-Century: Post- Fin’amor Transitions in Petrarchan-Influenced Poetry 336 8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor 353 I. The Value of the Individual in the Sonnets 353 II. Shakespeare’s Plays: Children as Property 367 III. Love as Resistance: Silvia and Hermia 378 IV. Love as Resistance: Juliet and the Critics who Disdain 393 9. Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature 421 I. Carpe Diem in Life and Marriage: John Donne and the Critics who Distance 422 II. The Lyricist of Carpe Diem : Robert Herrick and the Critics who Distort 445 10. Paradise Lost: Love in Eden, and the Critics who Obey 467 Epilogue. Belonging to Poetry: A Reparative Reading 501 Bibliography 513 Index 553 Acknowledgements This book emerges from multiple experiences and perspectives: teaching students at California State University and the University of California; leaving a religious tradition, and leaving a country and an entire way of life; extensive written and verbal conversations with people from all over the world—from the Middle East, Africa, Sri Lanka, Western Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Asian Pacific Rim; and finally, an attempt to understand what has happened to the study of poetry, especially love poetry, in modern literary education. Our thanks go out to Alessandra Tosi, Lucy Barnes and Francesca Giovannetti at Open Book Publishers, who worked tirelessly with us on the manuscript to make this book possible. Thanks are due especially to Nazanin Keynejad, who read and commented upon the first draft of this book, and to Modje Taavon, who provided valuable insight into the similarities between the early modern European and contemporary Middle Eastern cultures. Special thanks are also due to Robert Bryson, Naomi Bryson, Heather Bryson, Alan Wolstrup, Steven Wolstrup, Yeprem Movsesian, Ruzan Petrosian, Haik Movsesian, and Edgar Movsesian, not only for their differing experiences and perspectives, but for personal encouragement and support. A Note on Sources and Languages This book works with material that spans two thousand years and multiple languages. Many, though by no means all, of the sources it works with are from older editions that are publicly available online. This is done deliberately in order to allow readers who may not be attached to insitutions with well-endowed libraries to access as much of the information that informs this work as possible, without encountering paywalls or other access restrictions. It was not possible to follow this procedure in all cases, but every effort has been made. Where the book works with texts in languages other than English, the original is provided along with an English translation. This is done in order to emphasize that the poetic and critical tradition spans both time and place, reflecting arguments that are conducted in multiple language traditions. This is also done, frankly, to make a point about language education in the English- speaking world, especially in the United States, where foreign-language requirements are increasingly being questioned and enrollment figures have declined over the last half-century—according to the 2015 MLA report, language enrollments per 100 American college students stands at 8.1 as of 2013, which is half of the ratio from 1960 (https://www.mla. org/content/download/31180/1452509/EMB_enrllmnts_nonEngl_2013. pdf, 37). Languages matter. Words matter. One of the arguments of this book is that the specific words and intentions of the poets and the critics matter; though English translation is necessary, it is not sufficient. Quoting the original words of the poets and the critics is a way of giving the authors their voice. 1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics I The Poetry of Love Love has always had its critics. They range far and wide throughout history, from Plato and the Neoplatonists, to the Rabbinic and Christian interpreters of the Song of Songs, from the clerics behind the savage Albigensian Crusade, to the seventeenth-century English Puritan author William Prynne, who never met a joy he failed to condemn. Love has never lacked for those who try to tame it for “higher” purposes, or those who would argue that “the worst evils have been committed in the name of love”. 1 At the same time, love has always had its passionate defenders, though these have more often tended to be poets—the Ovids, Shakespeares, and Donnes—than critics of poetry. The relationship between the two—poets and critics—is one of the central concerns of this book. The story this book tells follows two paths: it is a history of love, a story told through poetry and its often adversarial relationship to the laws and customs of its times and places. But it is also a history of the way love and poetry have been treated, not by our poets, but by those our culture has entrusted with the authority to perpetuate the understanding, and the memory, of poetry. This authority has been 1 Aharon Ben-Ze ʼ ev and Ruhama Goussinsky. In the Name of Love : Romantic Ideology and Its Victims (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 63. © 2017 Michael Bryson and Arpi Movsesian, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0117.01 2 Love and its Critics abused by a tradition of critics and criticism over two thousand years old, a tradition dedicated to reducing poetry to allegory or ideology, insisting that the words of poems do not mean what they appear to mean to the average reader. And yet, love and its poetry fight back, not just against critics but against all the real and imagined tyrants of the world. As we will see in the work of Shakespeare, love stands against a system of arranged marriages in which individual desires are subordinated to the rule of the Father, property, and inherited wealth. Sometimes, as in Milton’s Paradise Lost , love will even stand against God himself. As Dante demonstrates with his account of Paolo and Francesca, love lives the truth that Milton’s Satan speaks: it is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. What is this love? And how is it treated in our poetry? Ranging from the ancients to the early moderns, from the Bible to medieval literature, from Shakespeare to the poetry of the seventeenth century and our own modern day, the love presented here is neither exclusively of the body, nor exclusively of the spirit. It is not merely sex—though some critics have been eager to dismiss it in just this way. Neither, however, is it only spiritual, intellectual, emotional, or what is popularly referred to as Platonic. The love this book considers, and that so much of our poetry celebrates, is a combination of the physical and the emotional, the sexual and the intellectual, the embodied and the ethereal. Above all, it is a matter of mutual choice between lovers who are each at once Lover and Beloved. Often marginalized by, and in opposition to church, state, and the institutions of marriage and law, this love is what the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries referred to as fin’amor. 2 It is anarchic and threatening to the established order, and a great deal of cultural energy has gone into taming it. Fin’amor —passionate and mutually chosen love, desire, and regard— has been invented and reinvented over the centuries. It appears in Hellenistic Jerusalem as a glimpse back into the age of Solomon, then fades into the dim background of Rabbinical and Christian allegory. It 2 This working definition is at odds with much, though by no means all, of the specialized scholarship on troubadour poetry. One of the major contentions of this book is that too much of the work by specialists in many literary fields minimizes, reinterprets, or outright ignores the human elements of love and desire in poetry, a situation which scholars like Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay admit has gone too far. See “Introduction”. In Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, eds. The Troubadours : An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 6. 3 1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics is revived in France, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, by poets and an unusual group of Rabbis, only to fade once again, betrayed by later poets writing under the twin spells of Neoplatonism and Christianizing allegory. These later poets radically reshape the ideas of love expressed in the poems of medieval Provençe and the ancient Levant, writing in what Dante calls the “sweet new style” ( dolce stil novo ) that changed love into worship, men into idolators, and women into idols. The influence of their verse is still observable in the English poetry of Philip Sidney two hundred years after the death of Petrarch, the dolce stil novo ’s high priest. Subsequently, writers such as Shakespeare, Donne, Herrick, and Milton re-invent the love that had almost been lost, putting a new version of fin’amor on the stage and on the page, pulling it back into the light and out of the shadows of theology, philosophy, and law. For better, or for worse, fin’amor has been with us ever since. II Love’s Nemesis: Demands for Obedience Running parallel with the tradition of love poetry is a style of thought which argues that obedience, rather than passion, is the prime virtue of humankind. Examples of obedience demanded and given are abundant in our scriptures, such as the injunction in Genesis against eating from the Tree of Knowledge; in our poetry, such as the Aeneid ’s portrayal of Aeneas rejecting Dido in obedience to the gods; and even in our philosophy, as in Aristotle’s distinction between free men and slaves: “It is true, therefore, that there are by natural origin those who are truly free men, but also those who are visibly slavish, and for these slavery is both beneficial and just”. 3 Such expectations of obedience often appear in the writing of those who argue that human law derives from divine law. Augustine argues that though God did not intend that Man should have dominion over Man, it now exists because of sin: 3 “ὅτι μὲν τοίνυν εἰσὶ φύσει τινὲς οἱ μὲν ἐλεύθεροι οἱ δὲ δοῦλοι, φανερόν, οἷς καὶ συμφέρει τὸ δουλεύειν καὶ δίκαιόν ἐστιν”(Aristotle Politics , ed. by Harris Rackham [Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press], 1932, 1255a, 22, 24). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are ours. 4 Love and its Critics But by nature, as God first created us, no one was a slave either of man or of sin. In truth, our present servitude is penal, a penalty which is meant to preserve the natural order of law and forbids its disturbance; because, if nothing had been done contrary to that law, there would have been nothing to restrain by penal servitude. 4 Nearly a millennium later, Thomas Aquinas argues from a similar perspective: “The order of justice requires that inferiors obey their superiors, for otherwise the stability of human affairs could not be maintained”. 5 Even a famous rebel like Martin Luther directs ordinary citizens to obey the law God puts in place: “No man is by nature Christian or religious, but all are sinful and evil, wherefore God restrains them all through the law, so that they do not dare to practice their wickedness externally with works”. 6 According to John Calvin, absolute obedience is due not only to benevolent rulers, but also to tyrants. Wicked rulers are a punishment from God: Truthfully, if we look at the Word of God, this will lead us further. We are not only to be subject to their authority, who are honest, and rule by what ought to be the gift of God’s love to us, but also to the authority of all those who in any way have come into power, even if their rule is nothing less than that of the office of the princes of the blind. [...] at the same time he declares that, whatever they may be, they have their rule and authority from him. 7 4 “Nullus autem natura, in qua prius Deus hominem condidit, seruus est hominis aut peccati. Verum et poenalis seruitus ea lege ordinatur, quae naturalem ordinem conseruari iubet, perturbari uetat; quia si contra eam legem non esset factum, nihil esset poenali seruitute coërcendum” (Augustine of Hippo. De Civitate Dei [Paris: 1586], Book 19, Chapter 15, 250, https://books.google.com/books?id=pshhAAAAcA AJ&pg=PA250). 5 “Ordo autem iustitiae requirit ut inferiores suis superioribus obediant, aliter enim non posset humanarum rerum status conservari” (Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae : Vol. 41 , Virtues of Justice in the Human Community , ed. by T. C. O’Brien [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 2a2ae. Q104, A6, 72). 6 “Nun aber kein Mensch von Natur Christ oder fromm ist, sondern sie allzumal Sünder und böse sind, wehret ihnen Gott allen durchs Gesetz, daß sie ihre Bosheit nicht äußerlich mit Werken nach ihrem Mutwillen zu üben wagen” (Martin Luther. Von Weltlicher Obrigkeit [Berlin: Tredition Classics, 2012], 10). 7 Verùm si in Dei verbum respicimus, longius nos deducet, ut non eorum modò principú imperio subditi simus, qui probè, & qua debét fide munere suo erga nos defungútur: sed omnium qui quoquo modo rerum potiuntur, etiamsi nihil minus praestét quàm quod ex officio principum. [...] simul tamen declarat, qualescunque sint, nonnisi à se habere imperium. 5 1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics For these thinkers, obedience is the prime duty of humankind, because it is ultimately in service to the God who established all authority in the first place. To be obedient is therefore to be pleasing to God. Such demands for obedience are ancient, and widespread, but resistance has its own long tradition. Étienne de La Boétie, the sixteenth- century author, judge, and friend to Michel Montaigne, argues that human beings have long become so used to servitude that they no longer know how to be free: It is incredible how a people, when it becomes subject, falls so suddenly and profoundly into forgetfulness of its freedom, so that it is not possible for them to win it back, serving so frankly and so happily that it seems, at a glance, that they have not lost their freedom but won their servitude. 8 La Boétie maintains that obedience has become so engrained in most people, that they regard their subjection as normal and necessary: They will say they have always been subjects, and their fathers lived the same way; they will think they are obliged to endure the evil, and they demonstrate this to themselves by examples, and find themselves in the length of time to be the possessions of those who lord it over them; but in reality, the years never gave any the right to do them wrong, and this magnifies the injury. 9 This “injury” leads La Boétie to reject the idea of natural obedience, proposing instead a model through which he accuses “the tyrants” (“les tyrans”) of carefully inculcating the idea of submission into the populations they dominate: Jean Calvin. Institutio Christianae Religionis (Geneva: Oliua Roberti Stephani, 1559), 559, https://books.google.com/books?id=6ysy-UX89f4C&dq=Oliua+Roberti+Stepha ni,+1559&pg=PA559 8 “Il n’est pas croyable comme le peuple, dès lors qu’il est assujetti, tombe si soudain en un tel et si profond oubli de la franchise, qu’il n’est pas possible qu’il se réveille pour la ravoir, servant si franchement et tant volontiers qu’on dirait, à le voir, qu’il a non pas perdu sa liberté, mais gagné sa servitude” (Étienne de La Boétie. Discours de la Servitude Volontaire [1576] [Paris: Éditions Bossard, 1922], 67, https://fr.wikisource. org/wiki/Page:La_Boétie_-_Discours_de_la_servitude_volontaire.djvu/73). 9 “Ils disent qu’ils ont été toujours sujets, que leurs pères ont ainsi vécu; ils pensent qu’ils sont tenus d’endurer le mal et se font accroire par exemple, et fondent eux- mêmes sous la longueur du temps la possession de ceux qui les tyrannisent; mais pour vrai, les ans ne donnent jamais droit de mal faire, ains agrandissent l’injure” ( ibid. , 74–75, https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:La_Boétie_-_Discours_de_la_ servitude_volontaire.djvu/80). 6 Love and its Critics The first reason why men willingly serve, is that they are born serfs and are nurtured as such. From this comes another easy conclusion: people become cowardly and effeminate under tyrants. 10 [...] It has never been but that tyrants, for their own assurance, have made great efforts to accustom their people to them, [training them] not only in obedience and servitude, but also in devotion. 11 Two centuries later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau raises his voice against the authority of “les tyrans”, arguing that liberty is the very basis of humanity: To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, the rights of humanity, even its duties. [...] Such a renunciation is incompatible with the nature of man, and to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his actions. Finally, it is a vain and contradictory convention to stipulate on the one hand an absolute authority, and on the other an unlimited obedience.12 But what Rousseau calls a renunciation of liberty, framing it as a conscious act, La Boétie presents as something that is done to rather than done by average men and women: “they are born as serfs and nurtured as such”. In the latter’s view, it is those in authority who “nurture” (raise, nourish, even instruct) their populations into the necessary attitudes of what Rousseau will later call une obéissance sans bornes Such “nurture” performs a pedagogical function, teaching men and women to think their bondage is natural: for La Boétie, “it is certain that custom, which in all things has great power over us, has no greater 10 “[L]a première raison pourquoi les hommes servent volontiers, est pour ce qu’ils naissent serfs et sont nourris tels. De celle-ci en vient une autre, qu’aisément les gens deviennent, sous les tyrans, lâches et efféminés” ( ibid. , 77–78, https://fr.wikisource. org/wiki/Page:La_Boétie_-_Discours_de_la_servitude_volontaire.djvu/83). 11 “il n’a jamais été que les tyrans, pour s’assurer, ne se soient efforcés d’accoutumer le peuple envers eux, non seulement à obéissance et servitude, mais encore à dévotion” ( ibid. , 89, https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:La_Boétie_-_Discours_de_ la_servitude_volontaire.djvu/95). 12 Renoncer à sa liberté, c’est renoncer à sa qualité d’homme, aux droits de l’humanité, même à ses devoirs. [...] Une telle renonciation est incompatible avec la nature de l’homme, et c’est ôter toute moralité à ses actions que d’ôter toute liberté à sa volonté. Enfin c’est une convention vaine et contradictoire de stipuler d’une part une autorité absolue et de l’autre une obéissance sans bornes. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Contrat Social . In The Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rosseau , Vol. 2, ed. by C. E. Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 28, https://books.google.com/books?id=IqhBAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA28 7 1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics strength than this, to teach us how to serve”. 13 Some seventy years later, the English revolutionary John Milton makes a similar argument, describing “custom” as part of the double tyranny that keeps mankind in subjection: If men within themselves would be govern’d by reason and not generally give up their understanding to a double tyrannie, of custome from without and blind affections within, they would discerne better what it is to favour and uphold the Tyrant of a Nation. 14 Milton, in pamphlets that ridicule the pro-monarchical propaganda of his day, berates what he calls “the easy literature of custom and opinion”, 15 the authoritative-sounding, but empty writing and speaking that teaches “the most Disciples” and is “silently receiv’d for the best instructer”, despite the fact that it offers nothing but a “swoln visage of counterfeit knowledge and literature”. 16 David Hume later notes “the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers”. Hume explains this submission as a function of “opinion”, or the “sense” that is inculcated into the many “of the general advantage” to be had by obeying “the particular government which is established”. 17 By the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger condemns “tradition” as a manipulative force that obscures both its agenda and its origins: The tradition that becomes dominant hereby makes what it “transmits” so inaccessible that at first, and for the most part, it obscures it instead. It hands over to the self-evident and obvious what has come down to us, and blocks access to the original “sources”, from which the traditional 13 “Mais certes la coutume, qui a en toutes choses grand pouvoir sur nous, n’a en aucun endroit si grande vertu qu’en ceci, de nous enseigner à servir” (La Boétie, 68, https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:La_Boétie_-_Discours_de_la_servitude_ volontaire.djvu/74). 14 John Milton. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (London, 1649), 1, Sig. A2r, http:// quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A50955.0001.001/1:2?rgn=div1;view=fulltext;q1=Te nure+of+Kings+and+Magistrates and https://books.google.com/books?id=EIg- AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA1 (1650 edition). 15 John Milton. Eikonoklastes (London, 1650), 3, Sig. A3r, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ eebo/A50898.0001.001/1:2?rgn= div1;view=fulltext;rgn1=author;q1=Milton%2C+John 16 John Milton. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce . London, 1644, Sig. A2r, https:// books.google.com/books?id=6oI-AQAAMAAJ&pg=PP9 17 David Hume. “Of the First Principles of Government”. In Essays , Literary , Moral , and Political (London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1870), 23, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t1fj2db8p;view=1up;seq=27 8 Love and its Critics categories and concepts in part were actually drawn. The tradition even makes us forget there ever was such an origin. 18 In contrast, Edward Bernays—a member of the Creel Committee which influenced American public opinion in favor of entering WWI—regards such manipulation as necessary to ensure the obedience of the masses: The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. 19 Though Bernays thinks of such techniques as a good thing (foreshadowing developments elsewhere in the twentieth century), 20 for earlier thinkers like La Boétie, Milton, and Hume, it is crucial to keep a watchful eye on those who draw “the most Disciples” after them, for 18 “Die hierbei zur Herrschaft kommende Tradition macht zunächst und zumeist das, was sie ‘übergibt’, so wenig zugänglich, daß sie es vielmehr verdeckt. Sie überantwortet das Überkommene der Selbstverständlichkeit und verlegt den Zugang zu den ursprünglichen ‘Quellen’, daraus die überlieferten Kategorien und Begriffe z. T. in echter Weise geschöpft wurden. Die Tradition macht sogar eine solche Herkunft überhaupt vergessen” ( Sein und Zeit [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967], 21). 19 Edward Bernays. Propaganda (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), 9, https://archive. org/details/EdwardL.BernaysPropaganda#page/n3 20 It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. [...] If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it? (Bernays, 27, 47). Bernays’ ideas are not far removed from those being promulgated on the other side of the Atlantic ocean by an aspiring literary critic and author whose Ph.D. in literature was obtained at the University of Heidelberg in 1921, and whose critical acumen was given a real-world application approximately a decade later: Propaganda is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. [...] Whether or not it conforms adequately to aesthetic demands is meaningless. [...] The end of our movement was to mobilize the people, to organize the people, and win them for the idea of national revolution. Denn Propaganda ist nicht Selbstzweck, sondern Mittel zum Zweck. [...] ob es in jedem Falle nun scharfen ästhetischen Forderungen entspricht oder nicht, ist dabei gleichgültig. [...] Der Zweck unserer Bewegung war, Menschen zu mobilisieren, Menschen zu organisieren und für die nationalrevolutionäre Idee zu gewinnen. [March 15, 1933]. In Joseph Goebbels, Revolution der Deutschen : 14 Jahre Nationalsozialismus (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1933), 139. 9 1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics what they are teaching may well be the lessons of obedience to what Aleksandr Pushkin calls “Custom, despot between the people”.21 Alongside the long narrative of demands for obedience, stands a counter-narrative and counter-instruction in our poetry, framed in terms of forbidden love and desire. Love challenges obedience; it is one of the precious few forces with sufficient power to enable its adherents to transcend themselves, their fears, and their isolation to such a degree that it is possible to refuse the demands of power. Love does not always succeed. But for its more radical devotees—the Dido of Ovid’s Heroides , the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Occitania, the famous lovers of Shakespeare, and Milton’s Adam and Eve—love is revolutionary, an attempt to tear down the world and build it anew, not in the image of authority, but that of a love that is freely chosen, freely given, and freely received. Love rejects the claims of law, property, and custom. It opposes the claims of determinism—whether theological (Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, and the notions of original sin and predestination), philosophical (Foucault, and the idea that impersonal systems of power create “free subjects” in their image), or biological (as in Baron d’Holbach’s 1770 work Système de la Nature , which maintains that all human thought and action results from material causes and effects). These points of view can be found all too frequently, often dressed in the robes of what John Milton calls “pretended learning, mistaken among credulous men [...] filling each estate of life and profession, with abject and servil[e] principles”. 22 But in the more radical examples of our poetry, love defies servile principles, and is unimpressed by pretended learning. Neither is love merely a Romantic construct, a product of “the long nineteenth century [that extends] well into the twenty-first”, 23 nor a secular replacement for religious traditions. As Simon May points out, “[b]y imputing to human love features properly reserved for divine love, such as the unconditional and the eternal, we falsify the nature of this most conditional and time-bound and earthly emotion, and 21 “Обычай деспот меж людей”. Evgeny Onegin , 1.25.4. In Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. Sobraniye Sochinenii . 10 Vols., ed. by D. D. Blagoi, S. M. Bondi, V. V. Vinogradov and Yu. G. Oksman (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1959), Vol. 4, 20, http://rvb.ru/pushkin/01text/04onegin/01onegin/0836.htm 22 John Milton. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce . London, 1644, Sig. A2r, https:// books.google.com/books?id=6oI-AQAAMAAJ&pg=PP9 23 Simon May. Love : A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), xii.