Poetry and Thought

Abstract

This chapter examines the sustained association between poetry and intellectual inquiry in late medieval French writing inspired by three crucial works: the Roman de la rose in the form continued by Jean de Meun; Ovid's Metamorphoses, especially by way of the Ovide moralisé; and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. It argues that the Rose, the Moralisé, and the French reception of the Consolation of Philosophy together consecrate verse as a means of both furthering and shaping philosophical reflection, stimulating especially those compositions conceived of as poetrie in which rhetorical complexity and intellectual challenge are combined. The use of verse as such interacts with the trajectories of thought generated within this textual matrix. All three texts, in their different ways, show the extent to which reason and understanding are conceived in relation to the body, so that any attempt to separate knowledge from the body inevitably reinscribes the body. As a result, they infuse philosophical inquiry with an erotic charge that leavens it with playfulness and humor while encouraging poetic reflection on generation and the place of humanity in nature.