The Poetics of Love

Course Description

Summary

Magic. Jealousy. Why. Tenderness. Scenes. Waiting. Anxiety. Body. Night.
Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by the poet Richard Howard (1978), is a unique dictionary which defines the language, tropes, and patterns of the actual and fictional experience of love. Using Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther as a primary source, Barthes examines both the historical and modern received ideas about love in order to demystify them and to examine what remains true for a person in love. These fragments and figures—drawn from philosophy, literature, and his personal experience—will be our model as we attempt to define the discourse of poetry about love.

What is love poetry’s vocabulary and image-repertoire, its structures and metaphors? What are love poetry’s preoccupations and patterns, its historical tropes and modern innovations? A classic example of love poetry’s discourse appears in Shakespeare’s sonnet #130, “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing like the Sun,” a satire of the courtly tradition of the literary blazon in which the body parts of a woman are praised with natural metaphors. Yet, is the sonnet a love poem, a critique of clichés, or a poetic insult?

We will read—through time and space—well-known or should-be-well-known love poems, with detours into Victorian poetry, Modernist poetry, as well as stops at Sei Shōnagon’s, Emily Dickinson’s, and Friederike Mayröcker’s desks. Finally, we will read from a heady selection of 20th-century and contemporary poetry and prose poetry. Our discussions will be rooted in selected philosophies and critical theories about love, desire, and sexuality. Students who are familiar—or unfamiliar—with poetry are welcome to join this course. Assignments will include close readings, research and presentations, creative writing, and critical writing.