Literary Essay on Love

Literary Essay on Love

Love in literature: that great theme of always

The Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges said that there are only two topics to write about: death and love, each inspired by the two great works of the Western literary tradition: the Iliad and the Odyssey. The first is a warrior song, whose opening phrase ("sing, oh, muse, the wrath of the pale Achilles") alludes to rage and whose pages are full of confrontations, deaths and battle. The second, on the other hand, is a song about returning home, about longing for the arms of the beloved and about longing for a place to call one's own.

Of these two options offered by Borges, we will dedicate ourselves in this essay to thinking about the second. The love story in its multiple variants is undoubtedly one of the great themes of the Western tradition, present throughout thousands of years of stories. The Greeks, in fact, knew how to give it a central value among human emotions: there is the patient Penelope who, according to Homer, awaited the return of Ulysses by weaving a dress that she unwound during the night, under the urging of those who wished to replace her husband in the throne. But there is also Achilles' love for Patroclus, his lover and his companion who died in battle, which forces him to return to combat in the midst of the Trojan War: a war that, incidentally, it also began when the Trojan Paris Alexander fell madly in love with Helena, the queen and wife of Menelaus, and kidnapped her to be her companion.

Love occupies a leading but terrible place in the literary tradition of the West. And it is that almost any possible plot carries the seed of love in its womb: the terrible crimes of spiteful lovers (such as Medea and Othello) or those whose love is impossible (such as Romeo and Juliet); the unpublished adventures of those who are moved by love and desire (like Don Quixote is pushed by love for Dulcinea and the Greek rhapsody Orpheus pushed by love for Eurydice to look for her in hell); or even the daring that makes love possible, breaking class barriers and social conventions (as in the case of Tristán and Isolde, or of Bernardo and Eloísa). Love has been the engine of the stories of the West and continues to be today.

Many of the ways of narrating love engendered their own categories that are in force today. The sensual and libertine love of the famous Don Juan is still distinguished from the Spanish tradition who, instead of offering eternities, is content to live to the fullest the moment before passing from a maiden to the other, of the platonic and virginal love of Tristan and Isolde, which does not corrupt their feelings with the pleasures of the meat. Basically, the literary narrative has been able to draw a map of coordinates on the way in which, throughout the history of humanity, we have understood what it is to love.

Another important area in this regard is that of poetry. The love and erotic poems are among the oldest of the lyrical traditionsPerhaps because the human being has always needed beautiful or intense words to reflect his own emotionality, and that has been the work of poets. Among the main names in love poetry are those of the Italian Petrarca and his sonnets to Laura, or those of Dante Alighieri to his beloved Beatrice, heirs of a Greco-Roman tradition in which homosexual love had its place, as evidenced by the verses of Safo, the famous poet from the island of Lesbos.

The interesting thing is that over time the way of writing about love ended up shaping the way we live this feeling. Love literature also ended up being a school for love, rather than its exclusive reflection. It was a common phenomenon that after the publication of works of tragic love such as the Werther of Goethe in 1774, many desperate lovers emulated the suicide of the protagonist. The word "romantic", which we use today for everything that encourages the traditional vision of love and falling in love, also comes from an artistic label and above all literary, that is, of the aesthetics of romanticism, originating in late eighteenth-century Germany as a subjectivist and nationalist reaction to the rational and cosmopolitan world of the Illustration.

Romantic love, courtly love, tragic love... all these categories arose thanks to the influence of the literature in the way we tell (each other) love. We have made emotion a powerful narrative and poetic commonplace, that is, a traditional but inexhaustible topic, with many edges. Here is evidence of the eternity of love, but also of the powers that literature administers in the West.

References:

• "Love in Wikipedia.
• "Essay" in WIkipedia.
• "Love, culture and sex" in the Electronic magazine of motivation and emotion (R.E.M.E.).
• "Love in the West, between suffering and joy" by Loreley Gaffoglio in the newspaper The nation (Argentina).
• "Love" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• "Love (emotion)" in The Encyclopaedia Britannica.

What is an essay?

The test it's a literary genre whose text It is characterized by being written in prose and by addressing a specific topic freely, making use of the arguments and the author's appreciations, as well as the literary and poetic resources that make it possible to embellish the work and enhance its aesthetic features. It is considered a genre born in the European Renaissance, fruit, above all, from the pen of the French writer Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), and that over the centuries it has become the most used format to express ideas in a structured, didactic and formal.

Follow with: