Love Through the Ages - Traditional ideas about Love

Romantic idea of love (Poetry)

"love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds / Or bends with the remover to remove."

"And all that's best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes... One shade the more, one ray the less, / Had half impaired the nameless grace."

Artifice vs. natural aspects of love (Poetry)

""hynde... in a nett I seke to hold the wind... graven with Diamondes in letters plain"

"Flung roses, rose riotously with the throng, / Dancing to put thy pale lilies out of mind... I cried for madder music and for stronger wine, / But when the feast is finished and lamps expire, / Then falls thy shadow, Cynara!

Severity of love (Poetry)

"Who so list to hount I knowe where is an hynde... she fleeth afore / Faynting I followe"

"And I was (am) desolate and sick of an old passion... I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion."

Artifice vs. natural aspects of love (Gatsby)

"had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired"

"Her voice is full of money... High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl."

"bright with the bought luxury of star-shine... gleaming like silver"

Tony Tanner - "not association but posession" drives Dexter Green, from Winter Dreams, a proto-Jay Gatsby

Severity of love (Gatsby)

"pale, and there were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes... Gatsby, pale as death... standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes."

"simply confounding. He literally glowed... a new well-being radiated from him... there were twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room"

Facade and image (Gatsby)

"shiftless and unsuccessful farm people - his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents... his Platonic conception of himself."

"you look so cool... You always look so cool... told him that she loved him... You resemble the advertisement of the man... You know the advertisement of the man -"

Freud's 'Family Romance' - creates a better reality.

Romantic idea of love (Gatsby)

"an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness... what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams"

"believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year receded before us...
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaslessly into the past."

Michael Hollister suggests that romance dies with Gat