AQA A-Level English Literature A

Writers have treated love very differently depending on when they wrote, who they were writing for and what their society allowed them to say. The texts on the love list run from the 1590s to the 2020s, and reading them together works best when you know which ideas of love each one is inheriting, arguing with or rejecting. ## Love as a literary convention **Courtly love** is the medieval idea, developed in French and Italian verse, that a knight or poet serves a lady he cannot have. The lover suffers, the lady is distant and often married or of higher rank, and the suffering is treated as ennobling. **Petrarchan** poetry, named after the Italian poet Petrarch (1304 to 1374), turned this into a set of habits: the beloved is praised through a string of comparisons, she is cold or cruel, and the lover is torn between hope and despair. English poets of the sixteenth century, Wyatt first among them, translated and adapted these habits, and Shakespeare's sonnets and many of his comedies gently mock them. The sonnet is the form most closely tied to this tradition. A sonnet argues a case in fourteen lines, and the turn in the argument (the **volta**) often falls where the form changes: after eight lines in the Petrarchan sonnet, and near the final couplet in the Shakespearean one. Love poems in other forms, such as the dramatic monologue, the ballad and the free verse lyric, tend to be read against that background. The seventeenth century adds two further groups. The **Metaphysical…