Where Have All the Love Poems Gone? (Part One)

Sometimes I realize my good fortune in having been born in a time and place where I'm safe from being prosecuted for heresy--which is to say, affronts to orthodoxy. Though in truth, our own time--like the 13th century--could profit from some good heresies.  And the poetic tradition at that time attempted to provide exactly that. So, with this as its brief preamble, let's go back in time...

Since the tail end of the 11th century--1095 in fact--the Christian West and the Islamic world had become engaged in a series of militaristic campaigns--the Crusades. There were to be nine of these campaigns fought for the next 200 years regarding who was to control the Holy Land, in particular Jerusalem. The monotheistic world--split into two rival camps--had become bitterly polarized as they fought under opposing banners for what was, allegedly, the same and only God.

But as we'll see, in the West, these so-called "Holy Wars" led only to more primitive, and religiously motivated violence as the "holy fervor" of the Crusades turned on itself, and devolved into the Inquisition. If the central message of Jesus was Love--here was its corrupted version.  And a significantly imperious inflection point seemed to occur in 1302, when Pope Boniface viii delivers a papal bull, Unam Sanctum, that is summed up by its last conclusive sentence:  "Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff." (The political equivalent for our own time would be those like-minded autocrats declaring that they alone can save us, and thus, all should be subject to them).

Yet concurrent to these contentious years of religious extremism--and in part as a response to it

--the poets of the time were attempting to introduce a counter-cultural mythos. Its story has seldom been told. So, I'll continue to cobble a version of it in just a minute...

But first, my interest in researching this time period began about twenty-five years ago. I'd just spent about a year of my life being pretty whacked out of my gourd in love. It was as if a giant wave had taken me to a not particularly rational shore in myself, and deposited along with me, was a collection of ecstatic love poems entitled The You That is Everywhere. When the flood of poems again slowed to a trickle, I tried to look back and understand what had just happened to me.

Yet as a psychologist, it irked me that I didn't really have a handle on it. So I began to read everything I could about other poets who'd been somewhat overwhelmed by their experience of love. And I began to see commonalities, ways my experience had reiterated theirs. Yet strangely, nearly all of these poets had lived around the same time--between seven and eight hundred years ago. And this led me to further explore that cultural epoch.

 I also sent a copy of my new manuscript to Robert Bly--in part because I found his own collection of love poems, Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, to have been one of the surprisingly few good collections of love poetry published during the 20th century; and in part because I sought an endorsement from him for my own new collection. That endorsement wasn't forthcoming--at least not from Bly--though he did send me some of his own poems for a Buddhist lit mag I was then co-editing.  And in the process, we entered a correspondence exploring why love poems had in our time become something of an endangered species.

Bly at the time, a friend and fervent reader of James Hillman, thought maybe the dearth of love poems relates to the loss of what he termed "the large She"--i.e., the loss of a more archetypal perception of the beloved, for it seems that's more common today. And the more I thought about this notion, I wondered if the loss of the archetypal perception of the beloved isn't related to the culture's loss of a poly-mythic perspective.

For monotheism is monomythic, there is only one God, one basic myth that, in a sense, accounts for everything.  But in the process you wind up losing the pagan gods, and the different nuances of divinity they offer, which includes different nuances, different ways of loving. 

In this light, the troubadour sensibility that arose in the Middle Ages--and the sudden profusion of love poems that came in with it --was really an attempt to provide an alternative to the prevailing Christian mythos  and its mythological underpinnings, and the ways they had been narrowing our perspective of love.  And thus, maybe the ways that monotheism has continued to shape or limit our mythic imagination accounts, in part, for why Bly found that love poems are "hard to come by these days." (Though another culprit has been our widespread narcissism, which I'll get to in Part Two).

Other people have also commented on this curious phenomenon--the contemporary lack of love poems--including the poet and critic Dana Gioia who wrote, "love poetry has become the great neglected tradition." 

A reader might ask, how and why did this come to be?  (I know that I did). But "how" and "why" can be curious gawkers who might want the simple answer--and I couldn't apprehend any simple answer, any single answer--and so, I put on my detective's hat, continued to read everything I could find for clues, and then went into the following speculative ramble, hopefully coming up with some likely suspects...                                                                 

The one distinct period in world history where there was an explosion of love poetry in most European cultures--the 12th to 14th centuries, was also a time when those cultures--but also those in the Near East--were all in extremis. It was a time of religious wars and political upheaval. In addition to the Crusades, there were also the Mongol and Tartar invasions in which the cultures of the great Sufi poets were under siege.

Persia was laid to ruin. Rumi's family had to move to Turkey because of the Mongols invading present day Afghanistan, and Hafiz was nearly executed by Tamerlane--at least in an apocryphal version of their encounter--saved only by his presence of mind and ability to say the perfect thing under questioning. (And the exploits of Tamerlane--largely forgotten now in the West--make the autocratic, territorial invasions of Hitler or Putin seem the sophomoric efforts of naughty choirboys).

We might thus assume that there's something about living in such a time --when it's more obvious that death could come at any moment, and there's not much security to be found on the physical plane--that can help turn us in a more spiritual direction, like that old saying that there's no atheists in foxholes. Plus, there was a cross-cultural factor here as well.

Namely, that the pilgrimage routes into the shared Holy Land, and later the Crusades, brought Europeans into contact with Moorish and Sufic influences, including a long-existent tradition of Persian and Arabic love poetry that began to enter the West through an unexpected source--which I'll get to in just a bit. But for now, to first gain a deeper perspective, let's delve yet further back in time...

In the West, Christianity began to emerge with a near monopoly on the religious imagination by about the 4th century--"Christianized at sword-point"--was how Joseph Campbell put it. Because at that time, with the conversion of Constantine, Christianity begins to become a state-sanctioned religion, and then towards the end of the 4th century under Theodosius I, Christianity becomes the state-sanctioned religion--somewhat like Shi'ite Islam today in Iran. And fearing that they might usurp followers from his then nascent religion, in the year 392 AD Theodosius I outlawed the Eleusinian Mysteries, turning into ruble the sacred grounds where its transformational rites had been practiced for over  2000 years. (The greatest and longest running ritual event of the ancient world).

Until that time there had been any number of competing sects, whether Gnostic, or other splinter sects of Christianity, or Jewish-Christianity with differing beliefs.  But with the conversion of Constantine, the Roman Empire begins to have a stake in the religion game.  Previous to this time, Rome had wanted little to do with the various forms of religion being practiced within the Empire, as long as they created no political problems for Rome.

And previous to this time Roman religion had been polytheistic. In fact, when Caesar had gone into Gaul, he noted many of the same gods, the same forms of religion as those in Rome, though being worshipped with different names. But from the time of the Council of Nicaea, also in the 4th century, there's now an official version of the state sanctioned religion. For the Council of Nicaea was the first council in the history of the Christian church that was intended to address the entire body of believers.

It was convened by Constantine to resolve the controversy of Arianism, a competing doctrine that held that Christ was not divine, but like everyone else a created, human being. However, somewhat like America's current Supreme Court, the council deemed Arianism a heresy and enshrined the divinity of Christ by invoking the non-scriptural word homoousios (“of one substance”) to signify the absolute equality of the Son with the Father in a statement of faith known as the Creed of Nicaea.

With this dogma of the Church now officially established, the previously competing splinter sects of Christianity began to wane.  And finally, the remaining remnants of the Gnostics were exterminated by the 14th Century--the bloody Albigensian Crusades against Cathar "heretics" took care of that. (Though vestiges of Arianism and the espousal of a non-trinitarian God can still be found in sects such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Unitarians, not to mention other of the world religions excepting Christianity). 

While in Islamic countries--with some exceptions and periods of repression--the less fundamentalistic practitioners, which is to say the Sufis, were allowed to live and practice their religion without being deemed heretics. The Sufis have always been less ethnocentric, less polarized, and more geared toward recognizing the universal truth found at the heart of all religions. And more than any spiritual culture I can think of, the Sufis put great value, great emphasis upon the way of the heart--and its poetry.

Probably more than any other spiritual tradition, many of the most illustrious teachers and saints are poets. In the 13th and 14th centuries alone you have Rumi, and Hafiz, and Ibn Arabi, Sanai, Attar, and Saadi. And so in the Islamic cultures not only are the less fundamentalistic folks not completely ostracized, but poetry, and love poetry in particular, retain a lingering following. And the cultural consequences of this can be far-reaching and long-lasting. Though often covered over by fundamentalisms of all sorts, the more mystical roots are still there, not far from the surface, where anyone might stumble on them.

An American poet may carry a subliminal grief of alienation that comes from having grown up in a culture where the art he practices and has made sacrifices for, is continually being marginalized, and for the most part ignored. In a modern, capitalistic culture the bottom line is that "poetry doesn't pay."  So the culture's channels of dissemination and distribution tend not to support poetry very well or take it very seriously.  (Good luck in finding a literary agent for a poetry collection!). And so, an American poet may tend in his own soul to feel orphaned in some way, like a stranger in his own land. As a child, if he was read any poetry at all, it was likely Dr. Suess, i.e., a benign, whimsical kind of doggerel. Whereas by contrast, even in modern day Persia (Iran) which is currently ruled by a repressive and fundamentalistic regime, even so, children grow up having their parents and grandparents read them to sleep at night with Rumi or Hafiz--instead of Green Eggs and Ham.

And so, an American poet might find the level of poetic fluency in Iran quite astonishing, and perhaps even have a wish to have been born in a culture where poetry is taken seriously. And where even in more recent times, one of the most popular shows in the history of Iranian television has been a quiz show about poetry! That whole culture has been attuned to poetry at least since the tenth century. The Iranian people are soulful, often poetic--far less so, the oppressive orthodoxy governing them. But the deeper cultural substrate is why the average Iranian truck driver or barber may know more lines of poetry by heart than the average North American poet. 

Yet great poets--as with the mystics in any culture--are often voices speaking from the psychic outskirts of where most congregate, or really live their lives. And for this reason, even the proliferation of great spiritual poets in the Middle Ages was not enough to jolt the wider elements of Islamic culture from being centered in a more narrow, ethnocentric, and parochial view.

While in the West, there were counter-cultural sects, with their own practices, beliefs, and myths beginning to flow as underground tributaries beneath the increasingly rigidified dictums of the Church. And they made possible a climate in which love poems thrived--at least for a while. Two of these "underground tributaries " were the troubadour tradition, along with the Arthurian quest mythology--which were the two great poetic influences of the time that were attempting to remythologize the culture, and free it from the more narrow casing that had grown around the Christian mythos. 

And in Christianity you certainly had brotherly love, and you had agape, but where you had a supposedly celibate male priesthood making the rules, and where you have the mythic hero--Jesus--never depicted in an erotic encounter, you wind up with a religious sensibility that for the most part is anti-sex.  That's what the erotic climate is going to be like. It's going to be very ambivalent toward sexual love at best. And it's not going to value women very highly, which is the legacy that follows when your conception of the divine is a tripartite, all masculine affair, comprised of a Father, a Son, and a Holy Ghost. And where even today Catholic women cannot be priests. And where even today a pope (Francis) whom I otherwise admire, has portrayed Trump and Kamala Harris in equal terms because of the latter's stance on abortion.

But in the 11th century a couple of things begin to arise that will contribute to the explosion of love poetry in the following century. The first thing is that women begin to be noticed in a new way. Not entirely new, but new in the context of a patriarchal Christian culture. Women are suddenly elevated, become almost deified, and seen as a portal to something ecstatic, something divine.

And as earlier mentioned, the tail end of the 11th century also brought the beginning of the Crusades. But what I left for later was that as part of this ongoing warfare, there were also ongoing negotiation councils between these rival camps. And these negotiation councils contained a bit of a newsflash for the Christian crusaders. For the Islamic ambassadors were not so “heathen” after all. They were rather refined human beings. In fact, most of them were poets. And in addition to negotiating the customary terms of military engagement between military rivals, the Islamic ambassadors began to transmit something else.

They began to transmit elements of the sensibility found in certain strains of Arabic love poetry, as well as Persian and Sufic love poetry. Yet importantly, the Islamic poetic ambassadors weren't burdened by the Christian anthropomorphic conception of divinity--all that Father and Son business. So a different kind of eros could come through them. And this sensibility was being transmitted to one of the more refined and mobile conduits of European culture--who were also warriors mounted on horseback. Our very word “chivalry” seems to evoke these men, as it derives from the French word cheval which means “horse.” 

Anyhow, you begin to have this poetic, cultural dissemination coming up from the south, up from Moorish Spain, over the Pyrenees and into France.  And then in the 12th century, coming down from the north you have a re-emergence of buried remnants of Celtic and Germanic goddess worship.  And at the same time you find the spread of cults of the Black Madonna throughout Europe, which also is bringing up a lot of buried goddess material. As I may have forgotten to mention earlier,, there was no single factor that gave rise to all the love poems that flooded through the 12th to 14th century. A "perfect storm" arising from many fronts had gathered, all at the same time.

For we're also seeing a new kind of mythos, a new kind of story, a new kind of literature emerging, that of the Arthurian quest sagas, such as Parzival--and Parzival, in von Eschenbach’s version of the tale, goes through a series of initiatory encounters with women—one right after another—in the course of his deepening. 

The initiatory themes which the Arthurian quest sagas are so replete with are significant. And they’re significant --as both Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade point out-- because the Middle Ages had become a time in which initiation had practically died out. So the culture must have been starving for viable forms of initiation, for their lack had left the cultural climate in the condition of a Waste Land.  But the European soul may have also been starving for the type of goddess worship that had been repressed ever since Christianity had emerged with a near monopoly on the mythic imagination, beginning around the 4th century.

The 12th century also gives rise to stories such as Tristram and Iseult where there’s an erotic love triangle, just like there’s a similar love triangle between King Arthur, Guinevere, and Sir Lancelot. This theme of love triangles—or adulterous love --becomes quite central not only in the new stories, the new mythos arising, but also in the tradition of Courtly Love, which is also starting to emerge now. 

Now, the medieval term for Courtly Love is fin ‘amour.  Everyone knows that “amour” is the French word for “love.” So we need to look at that word “fin.” It carries multiple associations. For the style of love here has “refinement,” it has “finesse.” But it also has an end in mind, a finale. And that end or goal was a kind of transcendence. 

We might say that Courtly Love attempted to use erotic energy as a kind of soul fuel that could lead to God (though the God here was not exactly that of the Old or New Testament). The encounter of something ecstatically transcendent was the fin, the end or goal for fin ‘amour’s  more spiritually inclined practitioners.  And there were specific practices--gazes, visualizations, touches employed…in the light of which we might recognize fin ‘amour as a Western form of tantra.

 And taken together, all of these elements seem to reflect what a contemporary Jungian might call a collective awakening of the anima in European consciousness, an awakening of what Goethe termed “the eternal feminine” --which Ean Begg in his book, The Cult of the Black Virgin, notes as “the Muse of all true poets.”

So with the troubadours and Courtly Love you had this kind of counter-cultural flowering in which a new kind of love was going around, and it was tolerated-- for a while; as had been the rise of the Gnostic Cathars in southern France. But then the Church came down on that kind of thing, and became militantly opposed to anything that smacked of "heresy." At which point it launched a new crusade--in addition to the ones already taking place in the Holy Land. Only this one was a war waged within Christendom--principally against the Gnostic Cathars in southern France. The Cathars practiced an ancient form of Christianity that in many ways predated Catholicism. Preached in the vernacular rather than Latin, Catharism seemed less elitist, more accessible as well as more egalitarian --allowing women to play a prominent role in the community where they could wield a greater influence than they could ever hope to exert elsewhere. And the Papacy began to view Catharism as a major ideological challenge.

Lacking a large standing army, Pope Innocent iii would need troops to launch the Albigensian Crusades--which he procured by offering the lands of the Cathar heretics to any French nobleman willing to take up arms against them. And in 1204 he blessed those willing to do so with the same indulgence given to the crusaders concurrently fighting the Muslims for Jerusalem. Yet there were further inducements. Southern France was closer at hand, and some of the earlier crusades in the Holy Land hadn't resulted in victories, and the odds seemed better against the Cathars, plus recruits were also offered relief from their debts. When the French town of Beziers fell to the crusaders on July 22, 1209, the entire town of 20 thousand was slaughtered, and the city burnt to the ground. When the papal legate in charge was asked how to distinguish the Cathars from the town's Catholics, his infamous reply was: Kill them all!  God will know his own.

Not insignificantly, the language spoken in the south of France was Occitan, and differed from the early French of the north. And Occitan had emerged as the language of literature and poetry, rivaling Latin as the lingua franca of European nobility. And much of the population of southern France thus viewed the invading crusaders as foreigners cloaking their desire for territorial conquest in the garb of religious piety. And the ethnic hatred they experienced, was not so different from the "ethnic cleansing" become rampant in the 3rd Reich and other such horrors in the centuries to come.

Twenty years later when the Albigensian Crusades formally ended, these were its legacies: In a genocidal forerunner of the Holocaust, over a million people had lost their lives. The campaign against the Cathars severely limited the troops that France could provide for the 5th and 6th crusades for Jerusalem. The devastation wrought upon southern France led to the eventual decline of the troubadours tradition, for the Occitan courts that had patronized it had been destroyed; and resultantly, the immigration of the troubadours from southern France to the royal courts of Spain, Italy, and Hungary largely disappeared. (Imagine any counter-cultural movement--say the late 1960s in America--deprived of its minstrels).  Plus, this violent self-righteousness then directly led to the Inquisition.

In the process we were about to lose connection with all the imaginal aspects of the Great Goddess which had briefly re-emerged between the 12th and 14th centuries. Not just the medieval archetype of the beautiful Damsel in Distress, locked up in her tower, but the Crone aspect of the Great Goddess as well, the Wise Old Woman--who then becomes seen as a witch. 

Anything that smacked of Gnosticism, or any lingering element of the old pagan gods are now viewed as something demonically heretical. Sophia was basically burnt at the stake at the time of the Albigensian Crusades, the counter-cultural impulse was getting literally burned alive--all in the name of heresy. And maybe it's no accident that the poetic love tradition, certainly in the West, went downhill not long after, the victim of a virulent kind of fundamentalism.

But for a time you had the French troubadours in Provence, and Dante and Petrarch in Italy, and the Minnesingers in Germany. While in the courts of Spain you had troubadours also, and they're writing love poems in Arabic, Spanish, and even Hebrew. And in the East there's Rumi, Hafiz, and Saadi, and Attar, Sanai, and the Sufi Sheikh and poet Ibn Arabi. But also Lalla in Kashmir who was said to have walked nakedly through her life--whether literally, metaphorically, or both; and who was born in 1320, the same year as Hafiz--a year before Dante died...

Anyhow, all these folks are writing at about the same time, and with a spiritualized kind of eros, where there was this heightening of love for the personal beloved, and yet the love for the personal beloved has something deeper and more "transcendent" standing behind her or him. But then you have the Church coming down on the Cathars--and the resultant decline of the troubadours--and within a century or so following that, not a hell of a lot happening, at least in the West, in terms of a certain kind of love poetry, poetry with a devotional, feminine inflection, and where the personal and transpersonal intermingle and flow into each other, never again a huge wave of it like there had been before.

Of course there were other factors too that cut all of this off...Though the 14th century would give rise to the Italian Renaissance, the14th century was also a ferocious time of spiritual agony, a world plunged into chaos. And it wasn't just love poems that began to dwindle. The Black Death of 1348-1350 wiped out over a third of the population between Iceland and India--and the Bubonic plague was to return  four more times before the end of that century. Which means that you lost over a third of the poets, with many of the rest just trying to stay alive. To gain a historical analogy, imagine a pandemic like Covid lingering for a half century in a world lacking public health policies, let alone any vaccines. And the loss of over a third of America's population today would equate with over a hundred and ten million deaths.

The ideal of chivalry itself, which had lent its distinctive flavor to much of the romantic love of this time, was starting to erode, in some part due to advances in weaponry. In Europe there was also a "hundred years' war" that no one, not even the combatants could stop. There were also peasant revolts--and the answering panic and repression on the part of the landed classes. There was a schism in the Catholic Church with the Papacy removed to Avignon. (For a time there were two popes, and then three).  And in one of history's most outrageous statements of religious hubris, Pope Boniface in 1302 delivers that papal Bull that declares: "It is necessary to salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff."

In such a climate, people of mystical insight often had to operate with one eye peeled for the punitive fundamentalism that reigned in high places all around them. In 1328, for example, and within seven years of the last Cathar being burnt at the stake, Meister Eckhart disappears from the world just as he's about to be tried for heresy...

We might say that when you burn Sophia at the stake, love and wisdom become separated from each other. And perhaps when the Eleusinian Mysteries were outlawed in 392-- and the Gnostic Cathars killed and Sophia buried nearly a thousand years later-- we also buried some our deep images. And lost half of our philosophy, leaving us with less wisdom in our loving, as if love has gone off its rails, and become merely emotional love--a love that as Gurdjieff says, more easily turns into its opposite. And then not only do our love lyrics become trivialized and cheapened--just listen to rap music--but the whole culture ceases to be grounded in either love or wisdom.

After the first Crusade, the Pope then forbade women to go off with the men on their journey to the Holy Land--so perhaps after this initial idealization of the Church, and seeing oneself as being devoted to God, willing to die for the good cause, you then have men returning to women, and beginning to bring some of that noble, elevated, idealizing tendency into their personal, romantic relationships.

Only now, instead of the Church or the Virgin Mary, it's now maybe the wife or the daughter of the feudal lord who's getting that idealized projection. For it was often the custom for a man to love a woman of a higher social standing, and to then use his love for her as the inspiration to prove his worthiness--in the process awakening Amor, the slumbering god within him. 

There was really an emotional alchemy in all this. Fin 'amour intended a transformational process, a form of initiation that the Middle Ages had come to otherwise lack. And here the masculine ideal was a lovely triumvirate of Warrior/Poet/Lover, a leaning back into old Celtic sources, such as the Fianna--a mythical cadre found in Irish mythology and for whom admission required not only being able to demonstrate various forms of athletic prowess, but also an apprenticeship in poetry, and not insignificantly, that one treat women well.