James Joyce's famous dictum “Love loves to love love” points to the fine line between love and solipsism. The distance between the speaker of a love-poem and his or her love-object is often problematic; is the beloved the honoured recipient of the gift of the poet’s words, or a pretext for the poet’s own self-aggrandizement? Each of the texts we will discuss approach the problems of loving, and of writing about love, in different ways. The course invites and equips students to interrogate details of language and form, as well as to draw upon historical, cultural and biographical contexts, to explore the rich history of loves in literature.
The Greeks had four words for love; in English we have just one. In this course we consider love in all its forms - spiritual, filial, erotic and platonic - through a study of key texts drawn from across the English literary tradition. John Donne is revered by some as a consummate love poet, and rejected by others as a violent misogynist, on the evidence of the same collection of poems; the sex scenes in DH Lawrence’s famous novel are celebrated as ground-breaking and ridiculed as anatomically inept, often by the same readers. Both writers’ work requires us to attend to tonal complexity, linguistic detail, and the figure of the speaker, posing important questions about the status and voice of the beloved, as well as inviting us to reflect on our own responses to the presentation of sex in literature. Pope’s The Rape of the Lock is a masterpiece of mock-epic, in which a woman’s worth is reduced to a single item of her appearance. Can love – or any human warmth – survive the superficiality and the hypocrisy of 18th-century high society? These texts introduce our study of love literature from across the centuries. As well as Donne’s lyrics, we will look at Hopkins’s passionate appeals to God – composed in a style which was half a century ahead of its time and which is as breathtakingly beautiful as it is bewildering – and four modern writers whose deeply moving work invites us to consider the intrinsic link between love and loss in very different ways.
In spite of the clichés which constantly threaten to undermine the effort to describe love, whether romantic, filial or divine, again and again we see writers – and readers – drawn to grapple with the perennial questions: What does love mean, and how can the difficulties of setting it down on paper be overcome?
