a book recommendation

lately i’ve been rereading the allegory of love, c. s. lewis’ excellent work of literary criticism on a species of poetry so foreign to us moderns that lewis has to start the book with a chapter each to explain (very fruitfully for me) both courtly love & allegory. i feel a little strange saying that i would recommend this book, on an obscure topic & part of a tradition (literary criticism) which is proverbially obscure to uninitiates, to anyone & everyone.¹ hopefully the strangeness of the recommendation lends it strength.

for the scope of this book & a taste of its style, let me quote from its first paragraph:

The allegorical love poetry of the Middle Ages is apt to repel the modern reader both by its form and by its matter. The form, which is that of a struggle between personified abstractions, can hardly be expected to appeal to an age which holds that ‘art means what it says’ or even that art is meaningless—for it is essential to this form that the literal narrative and the significacio should be separable. As for the matter, what have we to do with these medieval lovers—‘servants’ or ‘prisoners’ they called themselves—who seem to be always weeping and always on their knees before ladies of inflexible cruelty? The popular erotic literature of our own day tends rather to sheikhs and ‘Savage Men’ and marriage by capture, while that which is in favour with our intellectuals recommends either frank animalism or the free companionship of the sexes. In every way, if we have not outgrown, we have at least grown away from, the Romance of the Rose. The study of this whole tradition may seem, at first sight, to be but one more example of that itch for ‘revival’, that refusal to leave any corpse ungalvanized, which is among the more distressing accidents of scholarship. But such a view would be superficial. Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still. Neither the form nor the sentiment of this old poetry has passed away without leaving indelible traces on our minds. We shall understand our present, and perhaps even our future, the better if we can succeed, by an effort of the historical imagination, in reconstructing that long-lost state of mind for which the allegorical love poem was a natural mode of expression.

obviously we’re most of us interested in love, and anyone reading this is interested in literature, and if you’re here (as you probably are) because of twitter, you might have some familiarity with what gets called internal family systems or parts work, which could whet your interest in a genre where someone’s internal experience is portrayed as a “struggle between personified abstractions.”

but so far i have been talking about this book as if its value is mostly in the book itself which is not quite right. what lewis gave me in “the allegory of love” is an entry into areas of literature that would have been rough terrain for me without his guidance. so much of my best enjoyment in life has been from reading that i am always very grateful for that kind of expansion. he opened up guillaume de loris’ romance of the rose for me, which would have been a puzzle without his help; i had already read troilus & criseyde, & loved what i could understand of it, but was able to love it more on rereading; i’m especially fascinated by and thankful for his discussion of the faerie queene.

these poems are not only worth reading for historical reasons, or even just historical reasons + literary enjoyment. these poets know more about human psychology than we expect, things that we tend to think were obscure until after freud—even things freud didn’t know, things we have forgotten, maybe repressed. spenser in particular (in lewis’ reading) writes about love and lust in a way that goes against the widespread understanding of the sex-negative past. i want to write more, later, about lewis’ idea of spenser’s idea of exactly what it is that people do when they sin by lust, how little it has to do with pleasure, the sterile, visual rather than physical, even (again in lewis’ view of spenser’s view) sexless nature of it—it’s a way of thinking about sex that i am surprised could exist before the mediating power of the internet. but rather than waiting to read about the faerie queene at third hand you would be better off reading the allegory of love.

1. or at least the smaller portion of “anyone & everyone” who would read this substack