A study of Maurice Scève's sequence of love poems, the Délie - the first French canzoniere. There are two main themes: Scève's rendering of the intensity and complexity of the human experience of love, and secondly, his exploitation of the European tradition of love poetry. Dr Coleman tackles broad issues concerning appreciation of poetry, and more particularly, difficult poetry. Comparing individual poems by Horace, Scève and Mallarmé, she pinpoints the task of a serious reader: to experience sensitively and intellectually human emotions couched in artistic form. The book does not offer doctrines about Scève's love. instead, it looks at the contextual linguistic formulae which create love within the poems themselves: the allusiveness, the intellectual rigour, the tautness, the juxtaposition of words, combine with the voluptuousness and simplicity of the images, rhythm and sound, to make out of the poems a timeless an intensely personal experience.
