Fulke Greville and the Rejection of Courtly Love

The soundtrack to today's episode

Topics discussed in this episode:

-Norman Finkelstein and Restless Messengers 

-Formal Poet Voltron At Loganberry Books!! Get over here! 

-Three great things: Literary Matters, 32 Poems, SLEERICKETS

-Ma! I'm On Sleerickets!

-Pre-12th century Medieval heroic poetry 

-Chivalry vs. Courtly Love

-Slammin the canon

-Dante is a sad, strange little man 

-and Petrarch needs to get a life

-The 16th Century Lyric in England by Yvor Winters

-Name a more iconic duo (power couple??) than Phil and Fulke. 

-"Elegy For Philip Sidney" by Fulke Greville

-Caelica C by Fulke Greville

-Caelica CII by Fulke Greville 

-Chorus Sacerdotum by Fulke Greville

Transcript

Versecraft 6-7: Fulke Greville and the Rejection of Courtly Love

            Salutations, ladies and gentlemen. Before getting into today’s episode, I simply must relay to you some exciting events on either side of the horizon of my reading series at Loganberry Books in Cleveland. Hosting this series has given me the opportunity to get to know so many amazing people: Rikki Santer, who offered to connect Versecraft to the Ohio Poetry Association shortly after I started the show; Philip Metres, whom I apprenticed under in my MFA program, but whom I never got to meet in person until moving to Cleveland; Marcus Bales, the Jonathan Swift of Cleveland; poets whose names I once admired from afar who have now become good friends, like Daniel Brown and Brian Brodeur, and so many other fine individuals.  Just this past week, I hosted a reading for a man who, since that one time I sold him a signed Howard Nemerov, has swiftly become a good friend: Robert Bernard Hass, a lovely poet, an erudite scholar, a passionate professor, and the director of the Robert Frost Society. Next month, I will have the privilege of hosting Norman Finkelstein, a poetic jewel of Cincinnati, the editor of the critical journal Restless Messengers, and one of the great Jewish intellectuals of contemporary letters. If you’re in the Cleveland area, please consider stopping by on May 9th at 7 p.m. for a chance to hear Norman read and discuss his fascinating work.

            This brings me to an event that I know will be a highlight of my year, and which I hope will be a highlight for many of you. On June 13th of this year, I will be hosting not one, not two, but three of the very best American poets currently writing, and whom together also represent some of the very best in poetry publishing and media: George David Clark, the chief editor of 32 Poems; Ryan Wilson, the chief editor of Literary Matters; and Matthew Buckley Smith, my dear friend and host of the hit poetry podcast SLEERICKETS. The Avengers who? Aside from these illustrious gentlemen, Bob Hass will be there, Brian Brodeur will be there, Marcus Bales will be there, and of course I will be there. It’s going to be a tour de force of contemporary formal poetry, and you, dear reader, should get a car or a bus or a plane to Cleveland in June and come join us. Think of it like the Westchester, Frost Farm, or Poetry By the Sea conferences, except that the event is absolutely free. Again, the date is June 13th, and while the start time is ostensibly 7 pm, I think I’m going to bump it a little earlier in order to savor a little longer all the goodness we’re going to hear, and provide an opportunity for such a great audience to read a little of their own work too. What are you waiting for? Pause this podcast, go to google, search “flights to Cleveland” and make it happen. I can’t wait to see you there. 

            As always, if you’d like to support this podcast or buy some sick Versecraft merch, you know what to do. Links in the show notes. Thank you so much. 

Finally, I recently got a chance to chat with Matthew and Cameron about Clarice Lispector, Rainer Maria Rilke, and much more, and you can check out the first episode of our conversation right now on the Sleerickets Secret Show, which I’ll link to in the show notes. 

            I’m going to start this episode with a hot take: it seems more and more clear to me that the concept of courtly love led to one of the worst detours and one of the greatest wastes of artistic energy in literary history. For half a millennium—from roughly 1100 to 1600— Western secular literature was dominated by themes of courtly love. For half a millennium, the insincere and artificial elevation of an unattainable mistress, forbidden love, and excessive heartache produced art that was largely contrived, formulaic, trivial, melodramatic, aristocratic entertainment. Such art promoted unhealthy and unrealistic standards of love, and a spiritual objectification of women which is detrimental both to women and to true spirituality. In the hands of great literary talent, this work could be charming and even show flashes of brilliance, but if it did not utterly transcend its conventions it was still damned to be, to some extent, superficial, mediocre, and potentially even toxic. 

Consider the great works of medieval literature either written or at least orally formulated prior to the 12th century: Beowulf, the Tain, the Norse Eddas, the Song of Roland. These heroic poems, which display a grandeur of register, a naïve clarity of utterance, and a moral seriousness which recall Classical epic, and which indicate a fresh and invigorating reboot of language after the collapse of the Roman Empire, make the fantastical, ironical, episodic romances and ornate, overwrought love lyrics of the following centuries appear utterly decadent and frivolous by comparison. 

 Of course, you think I’m being unfair. What of the unquestionable masterpieces of the High and Late Middle Ages? Well, to begin with, several of the best of those follow in the old heroic tradition: The Poem of the Cid, the Nibelungenlied, and the Icelandic sagas. Gawain and the Green Knight, which I consider the greatest poem in Middle English, is a strange and beautiful class unto itself. The Canterbury Tales, a vast anthology, partakes of many virtues and vices beyond our discussion here. Some of the poems I’ve mentioned thus far, like Roland and Gawain and The Cid, highlight the values of chivalry, but note that chivalry and courtly love are not synonymous— chivalry was originally, like bushido, a code for a knight’s behavior towards his lord, a standard of loyalty, piety, and martial valor. In the 12th century, the fad for courtly love replaced duty toward the lord with duty toward the beloved lady. Courtly love is an effete twist on traditional chivalry. Both versions of chivalry however existed side by side in the later Middle Ages. 

As for the great works of literature that are unquestionably influenced by courtly love, there are several that come to mind: the troubadour songs which began the phenomenon in southern France, The Romance of the Rose, Tristan und Iseult, Parzival, Troilus and Criseyde, and of course, The Divine Comedy. Renaissance examples include the sonnets of Petrarch and Shakespeare, Orlando Furioso, Gerusalemme Liberata, and the Faerie Queene. How could the humble critic possibly hope to slaughter so many sacred cows?

Well, dear listener, I don’t intend to. Rather, I merely insist that to the extent that these works succeed, it is not because of their association with courtly love, but in spite of it— and in some cases, their quality does indeed suffer from the influence. The best songs of the troubadours are dazzlingly virtuosic, formally innovative, witty, and eloquent, and such feats of language must be acknowledged as such. However, in terms of themes and ideas, they do not often rise much above the level of a modern pop song— indeed, the modern pop song would be nothing without the troubadours. Likewise, Troilus and Criseyde has all the beautiful language and earthy characterization that we would expect from Chaucer, but it is ultimately an abhorrent tale of a man who pressures his niece to have sex with a Trojan prince who is superficially infatuated with her, and then we are meant to lament the fact that while the hapless prince stays loyal, the poor girl dares to find a lover more conducive to her survival after being captured by the Greeks. Oh, the capriciousness of woman! 

Tristan and Iseult are compelled to reckless love by magic, so their situation is a bit more sympathetic, though Gottfried’s advocacy of reckless love is less so. In Wolfram’s Parzival, courtly love is in the background, but the primary drama concerns spiritual and sexual temptation, and the poem’s merit rests or falls on its exploration of these more realistic and profound concerns. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso is a jumble of fantastical, episodic entanglements, and does not attempt to be anything more than a tongue-in-cheek, well-written entertainment; Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata is more ambitious, but its attempt to fuse crusader heroics with romantic adventure results in a confused and distracting mess, much as when a character in an action movie is given a needless romantic subplot. This is the poem which demonstrates more clearly than any other how the pressure of a courtly love convention can botch an otherwise promising work of art.

And what of the Comedy, that absolute titan of literature? It is evident to many, myself included, that Beatrice, the supposed motivation for the entire cosmic journey, is, petty Florentine politics aside, the least interesting and convincing part of Dante’s story, simultaneously as important and as dull as the God of Paradise Lost. Moreover, it is hard to say whether Dante’s obsession with this girl he barely knew, whom he continued to exalt even after marrying another woman and fathering children, is more creepy, pathetic, or ridiculous. If Dante was not so extremely talented, the whole affair would be mortifying. The courtly love framework of the Comedy is a cringe-worthy misfortune that must simply be tolerated by those who wish to enjoy this supreme poem, which obviously has infinitely more to offer than the concupiscent psycho-spiritual fantasy of an aging Italian man. That these are the circumstances in which we find such a poem is almost as miraculous as the poem itself. Miraculous too is the difference in quality between the Comedy, which at heart is only superficially related to courtly love, and the earlier Vita Nuova, which is saturated with it. The first has a claim to be the greatest poem of all time; the second is almost shockingly unexceptional. 

Of course, the most substantial influence and legacy of courtly love flows through the genre of lyric, exemplified by Petrarch. Petrarch is, after Shakespeare, probably the single most influential post-classical poet, and this is to our woe. He was an impressively talented and intelligent man, to be sure, but his vernacular poetry exemplifies the worst of what I’m talking about. His hundreds of sonnets addressed to Laura, who may have been a real person or who may have simply been a fictional excuse to write poems, are absurdly melodramatic exercises in figurative ingenuity and empty rhetoric, petulant and pathetic, bereft of real love and real eroticism. 

Such poems had a potent appeal, however: to write like Petrarch—to be Petrarchan— was to show oneself a person of considerable learning, wit, craftsmanship, and fine feeling, all valuable virtues to advertise in the courts of Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Moreover, because Petrarch, following earlier Italian models, imbued his love poetry with a neo-platonic flavor, suggesting that love for his mistress was a stepping-stone to love of God, to follow in this vein was to also assert one’s piety and spiritual loftiness. 

Renaissance literature began in nearly every European country with imitations of Petrarch, whether by Thomas Wyatt in England, Pierre de Ronsard in France, Garcilaso de la Vega in Spain, or Luis de Camoes in Portugal. These poets often added to and improved upon their Italian model, but the fact remained that, due to the influence of Petrarchism, even into the dawn of the 17th century Europe remained entrenched in the silliness of the Petrarchan courtly love paradigm. Shakespeare and Cervantes had the sense to mock this paradigm, and the genius to transcend it, but neither was immune to its allures. The fact that Shakespeare’s plays at their best are so much greater, both conceptually and linguistically, than Shakespeare’s lyrics at their best is a testament to what a formulaic rut the lyric was in. 

As Yvor Winters famously pointed out, in England there was a healthy and superior native tradition of lyric which ran parallel to the Petrarchan tradition, exemplified by Gascoigne, Raleigh, and Ben Jonson, but it would take the advent of the Metaphysical poets to begin to truly liberate the English lyric from the Tuscan, and by extension, Occitan models that were draining away literary talent to feed courtly frivolousness. With his metaphysical conceits, Donne continued the extremification of Petrarchan metaphor that Shakespeare had begun, turning conceptual comparisons from decorative flourishes to meditative subjects in themselves. In his Holy Sonnets, he went a step further and took the devotional language of Petrarch and the troubadours, which had been appropriated from religious hymns to serve the name of love, and recentered it once more upon the divine, though unfortunately retaining much of the tortured artificiality and hyper-emotionalism of the Petrarchan heritage. 

Today however, I would like to talk about a fascinating poet from the previous generation who, having deeply drunk of the Petrarchan Kool-Aid, went on to reject it with a vengeance, and succeeded in freeing himself from the conventions of courtly love to a degree that neither Shakespeare nor Donne ever achieved. That poet was the first Baron Brooke, Lord Fulke Greville. 

Fulke Greville, who lived from 1554 to 1628, is best known as the biographer, colleague, and best friend of the much more famous poet, Sir Philip Sidney. The two grew up together as schoolmates, and served together as courtiers to Elizabeth I. In many ways they were complementary opposites: Sidney was dashing, flashy, sanguine and impetuous, while Greville was reserved, somber, quiet, and cautious. Nevertheless, they were inseparable both in their political as well as in their artistic lives. Together, they pioneered the ultimately doomed attempt to introduce classical meters into English. Together, they further developed the English Petrarchan sonnet— when Sidney began addressing his sonnets “to Stella” meaning “to a star,” Greville mischievously outdid him by addressing his own sonnets “to Caelica,” meaning “to the whole heavens.” Together, both furious Protestants, they attempted on numerous occasions to escape England to fight the detested Spanish Catholics, even volunteering as privateers under Sir Francis Drake, who ultimately rejected them. Elizabeth considered Greville too shrewd an administrator to dispense with, but eventually, Sidney received her blessing to depart, and soon after died in the Netherlands following gangrene from a Spanish bullet. 

All of England was distraught at Sidney’s death, but none more so than Greville. It is often tempting, especially to the contemporary identitarian scholar, to misinterpret intense male friendships of the past as homoerotic, but in this case, I think there is actually strong reason to believe that Greville not only loved but was in love with Sidney. To begin with, Greville never married and had no children, and as far my cursory research indicates, had no significant heterosexual relationships to speak of. Moreover, he later died under mysterious circumstances when a male servant of his stabbed him after feeling he had been unfairly dealt with in Greville’s will. On his epitaph, Greville made sure to list that, in addition to being the vassal of Elizabeth and James, he was Sidney’s friend. Most poignant and telling of all, after Sidney’s death, Greville wrote no more love poetry. One cannot help but think that his many love poems to “Caelica” were in truth not addressed to some imaginary unattainable woman, but to his very real love, Sir Philip. 

Greville’s elegy for Sidney, written in alternating hexameter and heptameter couplets, is remarkable. I can think of no English Renaissance poem, save for one or two by Ben Jonson, that is so wracked with genuine grief. It is, moreover, an excellent example of the native plain style. The first two stanzas run as follows: 

Silence augmenteth grief, writing increaseth rage,

Staled are my thoughts, which loved and lost the wonder of our age;

Yet quickened now with fire, though dead with frost ere now,

Enraged I write I know not what; dead, quick, I know not how.

Hard-hearted minds relent and rigor's tears abound,

And envy strangely rues his end, in whom no fault was found.

Knowledge her light hath lost, valor hath slain her knight,

Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world's delight.

Later in the sixth stanza he writes:

Now sink of sorrow I who live—the more the wrong!

Who wishing death, whom death denies, whose thread is all too long;

Who tied to wretched life, who looks for no relief,

Must spend my ever dying days in never ending grief.

With Sidney’s death, the always somber and cerebral Greville lost all interest in the sugary Petrarchan lyric, and instead drove his muse deep into the brutal theology of his militant Calvinism. There is no more abrupt transition in the collected works of any poet than the transition from Greville’s love poetry, full of cherubs and flowers, to his stern religious lyrics, full of fire and brimstone. It is fascinating to view Greville’s religiosity in light of his potentially repressed homosexuality. I find it highly possible that his guilt about the wrongness of his own desires informed his violently pessimistic view of the fallenness of the material world and the ineradicable depravity of humankind.  

The death of Sidney was the primary catalyst for Greville’s radical artistic transformation, but a transition of this sort had been brewing in his mind for some time. In his Life of Sidney, Greville writes: 

“For my own part, I found my creeping genius more fixed upon the images of life, than the images of wit, and therefore chose not to write to them on whose foot the black ox had not already trod, as the proverb is, but to those only, that are weatherbeaten in the sea of this world, such as having lost the sight of their gardens and groves, study to sail on a right course among rocks and quicksands.”

In other words Greville is saying: I never cared about wittiness or fancy Petrarchan decoration the way Phil did. Left to my own devices, my interest lies only in writing about the travails of real life, and in guiding those who have suffered hardship and existential suffering to a path of wisdom and rectitude.

The poems of Greville’s late period are indeed fiercely moral pieces of theological rhetoric. The Romantic critic Charles Lamb complained that Greville’s verse was “frozen and made rigid with intellect,” and indeed, many of his poems amount to the exercise of a sermonizing intelligence rather than the exploration of a poetic mind, an approach to poetry which the modern reader tends to find highly unsympathetic. However, beyond his unquestionable contribution to expanding the domain of lyric, beyond how singularly intelligent, precise, and objective his poetry can be, Greville’s value lies not in his Calvinist machinations but in his subtle grasp of psychology, born of the inward focus of Protestant meditation, and his spiritual candor regarding the brutality of life. One of his greatest poems, Number 100, completely succeeds in its moral impact without relying on dogmatism in the slightest. It is an English sonnet, and in its seriousness, insight, and carefully controlled diction makes most of the sonnets of Petrarch and Shakespeare look like clever children’s games. It goes like this: 

In night when colors all to black are cast,

Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;

The eye a watch to inward senses placed,

Not seeing, yet still having powers of sight,

Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,

Where fear stirred up with witty tyranny,

Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offense,

Doth forge and raise impossibility:

Such as in thick depriving darknesses,

Proper reflections of the error be,

And images of self-confusednesses,

Which hurt imaginations only see;

And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,

Which but expressions be of inward evils.

It is based upon the strength of poems like this that Yvor Winters judged Greville to be, alongside Ben Jonson, the greatest lyric poet of the English Renaissance, and, in his words, “one of the first poets to employ Petrarchan refinements on matters worthy of them.” 

 As countless poets have done throughout history, Greville here plays with the literal and figurative understandings of light and darkness, but does so here with exceptional brilliancy, for his entire poem is as insightful when referring to the imagined terrors of literal nighttime as the imagined terrors of a dark night of the soul. In both cases, “distinction is lost,” and the human mind, deprived of literal or divine light, invents horrors for itself, and powerless to control its own cleverness, its “witty tyranny,” sabotages its own powers of reason. The sufferer of night terrors shares with the atheist or heretic the condition of “not seeing, yet still having powers of sight,” and both, having a vacuum of meaning to work with, only confound and torment themselves by forging and raising impossibilities which have no metaphysical grounding. From hundreds of years away, Sartre and Derrida might feel Greville’s spittle upon their faces.  

After this insight, Greville offers another. In such depriving darknesses, “proper reflections of the error be,” and images of self-confusion are seen only by “hurt imaginations.” In other words, the demons that the mind conjures in its darkness do not spring up randomly—they, are, rather, the result of the person’s sins, deficiencies, and moral failings. A deeply Freudian observation by a 16th century poet. By contrast, Greville seems to imply, a sinless individual, or one among the elect, would be able to cope with darkness, the vicissitudes of life, and God’s absence with a clear mind. Life for them would simply be a good night’s sleep. Greville’s concluding couplet offers not so much a volta as a perfect encapsulation of his moral: those in darkness “from this nothing seen, tell news of devils / which but expressions be of inward evils.” Greville here breathtakingly turns superstition on its head: those who are most afraid of devils, nightmares, or other malevolent forces earthly or unearthly are not the most truly religious among us, but those who are most spiritually sick. While not the most sensitive to current understandings of mental health, it is a fascinating and compelling conclusion.

Having spoken about it, let’s now read through the poem once again:

In night when colors all to black are cast,

Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;

The eye a watch to inward senses placed,

Not seeing, yet still having powers of sight,

Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,

Where fear stirred up with witty tyranny,

Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offense,

Doth forge and raise impossibility:

Such as in thick depriving darknesses,

Proper reflections of the error be,

And images of self-confusednesses,

Which hurt imaginations only see;

And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,

Which but expressions be of inward evils.

Like a much quieter Milton, Greville raises the Puritan muse to dazzling heights, but remains an astonishingly free thinker. In poem 102, he offers an eloquent argument for secular ethics. I will read stanzas 3 and 4:

But grant that there were no eternity,

that life were all, and pleasure life of it, 

in sin’s excess there yet confusions be,

which spoil his peace, and passionate his wit,

making his nature less, his reason thrall,

to tyranny of vice unnatural.

And as hell-fires, not wanting heat, want light;

so these strange witchcrafts, which like pleasure be,

not wanting fair enticements, want delight,

inward being nothing but deformity;

and do at open doors let frail powers in

to that strait building, Little-ease of sin.

In other words, Greville is saying: Even if there was no God, sin would still exist. We know this because when we follow our desires excessively, we become confused, tormented slaves to our appetites. Like the fires of hell, which are hot but give off no light, sins are enticing, but provide no actual happiness, and over time corrupt our minds to the point that we are not even capable of happiness. To be a sinner, even in a godless world, is to be like those who are trapped in the Tower of London’s chamber of little ease, in which one is not able to stand, sit, or lie down, but must constantly be shifting around in discomfort. Once more, those two stanzas:

But grant that there were no eternity,

that life were all, and pleasure life of it, 

in sin’s excess there yet confusions be,

which spoil his peace, and passionate his wit,

making his nature less, his reason thrall,

to tyranny of vice unnatural.

And as hell-fires, not wanting heat, want light;

so these strange witchcrafts, which like pleasure be,

not wanting fair enticements, want delight,

inward being nothing but deformity;

and do at open doors let frail powers in

to that strait building, Little-ease of sin.

I would like to end with what might be my favorite poem by Greville. It is not, strictly speaking, a lyric poem, but a chorus from his closet drama, Mustapha. It goes like this:

O wearisome condition of humanity!

Born under one law, to another bound;

Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity;

Created sick, commanded to be sound.

What meaneth nature by these diverse laws?

Passion and reason, self-division cause.

Is it the mark or majesty of power

To make offenses that it may forgive?

Nature herself doth her own self deflower

To hate those errors she herself doth give.

For how should man think that he may not do,

If nature did not fail and punish, too?

Tyrant to others, to herself unjust,

Only commands things difficult and hard,

Forbids us all things which it knows is lust,

Makes easy pains, unpossible reward.

If nature did not take delight in blood,

She would have made more easy ways to good.

We that are bound by vows and by promotion,

With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites,

To teach belief in good and still devotion,

To preach of heaven’s wonders and delights;

Yet when each of us in his own heart looks

He finds the God there, far unlike his books.

Here, more than anywhere else, we see Greville’s theological boldness, his terrifyingly unsentimental, Jobean view of both life and God which is equaled in the Renaissance only by Shakespeare’s great tragedies. Even more shocking, this poem is meant to be recited by a chorus of priests! It is an existential anti-hymn accusing God and Nature of hypocrisy and injustice. How can human beings be held to an unflinching moral standard when we are so fundamentally depraved, “created sick, commanded to be sound?” Moreover, why is it that we are expected to be good when the rest of God’s creation is so unabashedly full of violence and lust? In what may be my favorite heroic couplet, the priests proclaim: “If nature did not take delight in blood,/she would have made more easy ways to good.” The priests are bound by their profession to “teach belief in good and still devotion” but inwardly they know all too well that the true God is “far unlike his books.” 

In his unflinching devotion to reality, to psychological interiority, to logical argument, to precise language, to lofty subjects, Greville’s was not a mind that could be hemmed in by insipid Petrarchan conventions or exhausted ideas of what a lyric poem was supposed to be. He demonstrates that while the tradition of courtly love produced much powerful literary technology—the sonnet, for instance— such technology could be used for more than ingenious pseudo-love poetry—indeed, for the grandest aims of literature. Greville was never and will never be a popular poet, but to those who know him he provides not only a body of spiritually stirring work, but a vision of what lyric poetry can be: intelligent, serious, unflinching, rationally structured, careful with language, which takes as its task nothing less than the salvation of our wayward souls.