The Love Aesthetics of Maurice Sceve: Poetry and Struggle

This book reassesses the love poetry of Maurice Sceve from a phenomenological viewpoint. It calls into question the traditional critical view of Sceve as a poet consumed by the anguish and darkness of unrequited love, and frustrated by poetic and erotic quests which lead him nowhere. Professor Nash argues instead that the conflicting forces in Sceve’s poetic expression of love (light and dark, night and day, heaven and hell) lead ultimately to a sense of equilibrium and a transcendent paradisal state, and that the poet’s struggle is actually directed towards this coming to terms with the meaning of ineffable love. Contemplation and portrayal of the ineffable are shown to constitute the central and unifying concern of this compelling body of Renaissance love poetry.