Maurice Scève

Maurice Sceve (* 1500 in Lyon, † around 1560, probably also in Lyon) was a French poet. He is regarded as the most important representative of the so-called blooming around 1550 Lyons school of poets whose unifying spiritual bond was the idealistic neo-Platonic idea of ​​love, which had taken over from Italy.

Life and work

Maurice Sceve was the son of a municipal judge from old Lyons family, received a good classical education and spent his life mainly in and near Lyon, the economically and spiritually thanks to its proximity to Italy flourished at this time and an equal rank intellectual center of Paris made ​​because it was not controlled by conservative institutions such as the Sorbonne or the Parlement.

Scèves -known works are the elegy Arion ( 1536), the eclogue La Saulaie, Eglogue de la vie solitaire ( 1547) and especially Microcosme, a 3000 verses long encyclopedic poem that the Fall of Adam and Eve as a prerequisite for the development of human capabilities and therefore all progress sees it represents examples ( posthumously published in 1562 ). Furthermore, wrote Sceve called Blasons, that then popular poems ( female ) sing parts of the body, visible, such as Le sourcil ( eyebrow ) or Le front ( forehead ), but also like the veiled.

His fame owes Sceve especially the poem cycle Delie, objet de plus haute vertu ( " D., the subject of the highest virtue" ), which he in 1537 after the encounter with his great, but unrequited love, 20 years his junior, also sealing Pernette You Guillet (about 1520-1545 ), had begun in 1544 and completed. The cycle opens with an eight-line Zueignungsgedicht and comprises 449 zehnzeilige poems that are divided into groups by emblems in pressure, after the system 5 ( 9 × 49 ) 3. The written in decasyllabic verses poems are all very ornate, often sealed. They speak of or in respect of an ideal lover who is presented as fundamentally unattainable, similar to the Beatrice of Dante or the Laura of Petrarch ( believed to have been found in Avignon in 1533 Sceve their grave ). With Delie - the name is an anagram of L' IDEA - is Sceve stylistically and thematically in the tradition of the so-called Petrarchan poetry, a 1330 inaugurated by Petrarch kind of love poetry that received in all the Central and Western Europe, and more than two centuries was imitated throughout.

Sceve knew not only in the Latin, Greek and Italian literature, but also in Spanish, the " Siglo de Oro " (Golden Century) just started and the first French intermediaries he scored with his transfer déplourable La fin de Flamecte, élégante Invention de Jehan de Flores ( Juan de Flores ), espaignol, traduicte en langue Francoise ( 1535).