Michael Bryson > Quotes

“Love has always had its critics. They range far and wide throughout history, from Plato and the Neoplatonists, to the Rabbinic and Christian interpreters of the Song of Songs, from the clerics behind the savage Albigensian Crusade, to the seventeenth-century English Puritan author William Prynne, who never met a joy he failed to condemn. Love has never lacked for those who try to tame it for “higher” purposes, or those who would argue that “the worst evils have been committed in the name of love”. At the same time, love has always had its passionate defenders, though these have more often tended to be poets—the Ovids, Shakespeares, and Donnes—than critics of poetry.”
― Michael Bryson, Love and its Critics: From the Song of Songs to Shakespeare and Milton's Eden