Love, Poetry, and Immortality: Luminous Insights of the World's Great Thinkers

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Rodopi, 1998 - 122 pages
This book explores and illustrates the individuating characteristics - and the interrelationships - of love, poetry, and literary immortality (such immortality, that is, as writers may win, in the sense of being long remembered and appreciated by future readers). From the book's numerous quotations of glittering literary passages, it is evident that love is often expressed in poetry, and that many authors (especially those writing about love) have expressed the winsome hope that their works would be greatly cherished by later generations. Part One of the book illustrates by passages of matchless poetry the joys and perils of love and other outstanding features of love. Part Two outlines the history of expressions by writers in many cultures of their confidence or hope that their works will make them immortal.

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Contents

PARTI
2
THREE
21
Marlowes Poem Come Live with Mee
53
PART II
67
Conclusion of Part II
103
About the Author
119
Copyright

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Page 90 - Your name from hence immortal life shall have, Though I, once gone, to all the world must die. The earth can yield me but a common grave. When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie. Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read. And tongues to be your being shall rehearse When all the breathers of this world are dead. You still shall live — such virtue hath my pen — Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
Page 15 - When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste...
Page 89 - And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion...
Page 15 - Desiring this man's art and that man's scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate ; For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Page 26 - Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Page 36 - IF thou must love me, let it be for nought Except for love's sake only. Do not say " I love her for her smile . . her look . . her way Of speaking gently, . . for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine, and certes brought A sense of pleasant ease on such a day...
Page 26 - As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in luve am I, And I will luve thee still, my dear, Till a' the seas gang dry. Till a" the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi
Page 28 - Out upon it, I have loved Three whole days together! And am like to love three more. If it prove fair weather. Time shall moult away his wings Ere he shall discover In the whole wide world again Such a constant lover.
Page 14 - When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd, Desiring this man's art and that man's scope...

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