Classical Love Elegy in the Renaissance (and after)

Abstract

Abstract This article presents an explanation on classical love elegy in the Renaissance. It also mentions that the linkage ‘suggested by the label is something of a category mistake’, and assures that ‘it plays out in literary history, though, as something other than just a mistake’. The Roman love elegies are not notably ‘elegiac’ in the dominant modern sense of the term. The Renaissance enthusiasm is discussed. After the Renaissance, the only major revival of the classical genre in clearly recognizable form comes toward the end of the eighteenth century. ‘Euphrosyne’ is perhaps the kind of poem that ‘love elegy’ in modern usage might most naturally designate: an encounter with a loved one in which intimacy and distance both figure in something like equal measure.