Maurice Scève
Maurice Scève (* around 1500 in Lyon ; † around 1560, probably also in Lyon) was a French poet. He is considered to be the most important representative of the so-called Lyoneser poet school , which flourished around 1550 , whose unifying spiritual bond was the idealistic Neoplatonic conception of love that had been adopted from Italy.
Live and act
Maurice Scève was the son of an urban judge from an old Lyonesian family, received a good humanist education and spent most of his life in and near Lyon, which at that time was flourishing economically and spiritually thanks to its proximity to Italy and formed an intellectual center on par with Paris because it was was not controlled by conservative institutions like the Sorbonne or the Parlement .
Scève's best-known works are the Elegy Arion (1536), the Eclogue La Saulaie, églogue de la vie solitaire (1547) and, above all, Microcosme , a 3000-verse encyclopedic poem that describes the fall of Adam and Eve as a prerequisite for the development of human abilities and thus sees all the progress that it represents with examples (published posthumously in 1562). In addition, Scève wrote so-called Blasons, d. H. Poems popular at the time that sing about (female) body parts, visible such as B. Le Sourcil (the eyebrow) or Le Front (the forehead), but also the veiled ones.
Scève owes its fame above all to the cycle of poems Délie, objet de plus haute vertu ("D., object of the highest virtue"), which he wrote after meeting his great, but unfulfilled love, the 20 years younger and also poetic Pernette Du Guillet ( 1520–1545), begun in 1537 and completed in 1544. The cycle begins with an eight-line poem and then comprises 449 ten-line poems ( dizains ), which are divided into groups in the print using emblems , according to the system 5+ (9 × 49) +3. The poems, written in ten-syllable verses, are all very artistic, often hermetic. They speak of or are directed to an ideal lover who is presented as fundamentally unreachable, similar to Beatrice by Dante or Laura by Francesco Petrarch (whose grave Scève believed to have found in Avignon in 1533 ). With Délie - the name is an anagram from L'-IDEE - Scève is stylistically and thematically in the tradition of so-called Petrarchist poetry, a type of love poetry inaugurated by Petrarch around 1330, which has been received throughout Central and Western Europe and for more than two centuries was imitated through it.
Scève was not only familiar with Latin, Greek and Italian literature, but also with Spanish, the " Siglo de Oro " (Golden Century) of which was just beginning and of which he was one of the first French mediators with his translation La déplourable fin de Flamecte, élégante invention de Jehan de Flores ( Juan de Flores ) , espaignol, traduicte en langue françoise (1535).
Web links
- Literature by and about Maurice Scève in the catalog of the German National Library
- Article in "Names, titles and dates of French literature" (source)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Scève, Maurice |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French poet |
| DATE OF BIRTH | around 1500 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Lyon |
| DATE OF DEATH | around 1560 |
| Place of death | unsure: Lyon |