The Reinvention of Love
Poetry, Politics and Culture from Sidney to Milton

How cultural and political change transformed the way poets thought and wrote about love.

Anthony Low (Author)

9780521450300, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 November 1993

276 pages
22.4 x 14.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.448 kg

"This perceptive and profoundly humane book offers a fresh and original perspective on the lines of development in Early Modern love poetry as well as a timely reassessment of the views of earlier critics...provides helpful insights into the thought of Milton and Donne in particular and a basis for qualifying and revaluing some of the major emphases of recent critical theory..." John M. Steadman, International Journal of the Classical Tradition

In The Reinvention of Love Anthony Low argues that cultural, economic and political change transformed the way poets from Sidney to Milton thought and wrote about love. Examining the interface between social, political and economic practices and individual psyches, as reflected in literary texts, Professor Low illuminates the connections between material circumstances, perceptions, and ideals. Through detailed readings of the work of Sidney, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Carew, and Milton, he shows how from the late sixteenth century poets struggled to replace the older Petrarchan tradition with a form of love in harmony with a changing world, and to reconcile human love and sacred devotion. Donne fled the social world; Carew made new accommodations with it; Milton revised it. For Milton, sacred love, cut off from communal norms, verges on hatred, while married love takes on the burden of assuaging loneliness in a threatening world.

Preface
Introduction
1. Sir Philip Sidney: 'Huge desyre'
2. John Donne: 'Defects of lonelinesse'
3. John Donne: 'The Holy Ghost is amorous in his metaphors'
4. George Herbert: 'The best love'
5. Richard Crashaw: 'Love's delicious fire'
6. Thomas Carew: 'Fresh invention'
7. John Milton: 'Because we freely love'
8. John Milton: 'Haile wedded love'
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]