1. Love and Authority: Love Poetry and its Critics

I. The Poetry of Love Love has always had its critics. They range far and wide throughout history, from Plato and the Neoplatonists, to the Rabbinic and Christian interpreters of the Song of Songs, from the clerics behind the savage Albigensian Crusade, to the seventeenth-century English Puritan author William Prynne, who never met a joy he failed to condemn. Love has never lacked for those who try to tame it for “higher” purposes, or those who would argue that “the worst evils have been comm..