The Educated Heart: Provencal Love Poetry of the 12th Century

During this talk, Robert Bly gives a delicate and lively view of the fantastic flowering of feeling in the 12th century Provence. The feeling thought, developed of Arabic, Gnostic, and Albigensian sources, blossoms as love poetry famous at that time. Bly distinguishes in this talk between the literal mode, the psychological mode and the mythological mode, and he locates the "Amor" or ecstatic love in the latter. That mythological mode of feeling led to Sufism among the Arabs. When we hear the Provencal poetry he recites toward the end we recognize the terrible loss we suffered when these traditions were uprooted and destroyed.