jgkeely's review
5.0
I don't blame Tolkien for the legions of sad imitators in his wake, and I don't blame Petrarch for the development of romantic love as an obsessive perversion. I know it grew out of the obsessive, perverse love that the church fostered (and which may have met its climax, so to speak, in Margery Kempe's sickeningly erotic meditation on The Wound). Petrarch was a genius. He took what came before, he reinvented it, he filled it with the bizarre and the beautiful. He is the beginning of modern poetry; and though I love the epic, his small, personal journies show that sometimes, the first is still the best.
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