Famous Lovers #
Mythical Tales
Orpheus and Eurydice #
Orpheus had skill and respect for his music. At one such gathering of humans and beasts that his eyes fell on a wood nymph, called Eurydice, she was beautiful and shy. She had been drawn to Orpheus enamoured by his voice and such was the spell of beauty in music and appearance that neither could cast their eyes off each other.
When she dies of a snake-bite, Orpheus decided to go to Underworld and try to get his wife back.
Orpheus said why he was there, in a voice both mellifluous and disquieting. He played his lyre and sang out to King Hades and Queen Persephone that Eurydice was returned to him.
Hades openly wept, Persephone’s heart melted and even Cerberus, the gigantic three-headed hound guarding the entry to the underworld, covered his many ears with his paws and howled in despair.
Hades promised to this desperate man that Eurydice would follow him to the Upper World, as long as he did not look back while his wife was still in the dark, for that would undo everything he hoped for. He should wait for Eurydice to get into the light before he looked at her.
The moment he stepped on the world of the living, he turned his head to hug his wife. Unfortunately, he got only a glimpse of Eurydice before she was once again drawn back into the underworld.
Like Lot’s wife, we must not look back – but look to the future.
Hero and Leander #
Hero, virgin priestess of Aphrodite at Sestos, was seen at a festival by Leander of Abydos; they fell in love, and he swam the Hellespont at night to visit her, guided by a light from her tower. One stormy night the light was extinguished, and Leander was drowned; Hero, seeing his body, drowned herself likewise.
amative - disposed to love; amorous. Amative stems from the Latin verb amāre meaning “to love.” It entered English in the mid-1600s.
There are many Greco-Roman stories about unrequited love and the miseries it can bring. According to the philosopher Aristoxenus (4th century BC), one woman named Harpalyce died of grief after she fell in love with – and was rejected by – a man called Iphiclus.
Tristan and Isolde #
Were principal characters of a famous medieval love-romance, based on a Celtic legend, an archetypal poem.
The young Tristan ventures to Ireland to ask the hand of the princess Isolde for his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, and, having slain a dragon that is devastating the country, succeeds in his mission. On the homeward journey Tristan and Isolde, by misadventure, drink the love potion prepared by the queen for her daughter and King Mark. Henceforward, the two are bound to each other by an imperishable love.
One day Mark discovers them asleep with a naked sword between them. Soon afterward they make peace with Mark, and Tristan agrees to restore Isolde to Mark and leave the country.
When Tristan is dying Isolde agrees to come, the ship on which she embarks is to have a white sail; if she refuses, a black. His jealous wife, who has discovered his secret, seeing the ship approach on which Isolde is hastening to her lover’s aid, tells him that it carries a black sail. Tristan, turning his face to the wall, dies, and Isolde, arriving too late to save her love, yields up her life in a final embrace. A miracle follows their deaths: two trees grow out of their graves and intertwine their branches so that they can not be parted by any means.
Abelard and Heloise #
Among the most famous lovers of Medieval times, Abelard and Heloise, celebrated their love making by experimenting with unconventional methods. Abelard detailed their irresistible passionate relationship:
We were united first in the dwelling that sheltered our love, and then in the hearts that burned with it.
“Our desires left no stage of lovemaking untried, and if love could devise something new, we welcomed it. We entered on each joy the more because of our previous inexperience and were all the less easily sated”.
Because he was her Philosopher tutor in Paris, and twenty years her senior, her father, took exception when she became pregnant and sought revenge by having Abelard brutally beaten and castrated. Humiliated by the loss of his manhood, the lovers take religious vows as monk and nun; are separated for twenty years, and when they meet again, though the physical aspect of their relationship is no longer possible, declare their eternal love and oneness.
The child was raised in a convent.
Heloise writing 12 years after the separation admits: “Even in sleep I find no respite”. Though brief, the lovers found eternal true love.
Keats #
The longing for the presence of an absent lover is the love letter’s key characteristic. In Keats’s first letter to Fanny, this is expressed subtly, through a description of writing on the Isle of Wight. Keats remarks, It would be a lovely place to live, were it not for the “remembrance” of the absent Fanny.
T.S. Eliot, Emily Hale #
Emily Hale was a speech and drama teacher who got to know Eliot in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1912, when Eliot attended Harvard University. She was a friend of his cousin.
Eliot’s personal letters to Emily Hale, released in January, 2020, reveal a conflicted, indecicive, socially insecure, buttoned-up private life, surrounded by highly mannered, but gossipy snobby hostesses.
He reveals his pain at her decision to release his letters, as he feels a private man who finds it difficult to write about himself.
He had been unlucky in love. His first unrequited love was meeting Emily Hale at a Harvard Tea Party in 1912.
When he declares his love, he sees no signs of her returning it. He writes:
“I was very immature for my age, timid, inexperienced with gnawing doubt.”
A proposal appears to have been rebuffed, merely because she didn’t appear eagar enough.
Eliot left America for Germany but when war was declared, he went to London where he suddenly married Vivienne Haigh-Wood.
In his many letters to Emily Hale, he repeatedly claims he will never marry any woman but her.
“A couple have to love God more than each other which will make their love for each other more complete”.
Eliot writes his first letter to Emily Hale, attempting to re-ignite a relationship in 1922.
Ten years later, during a year teaching in Harvard in 1934, he and Emily Hale re-ignite their love for each other and write passioned letters for the next 13 years.
When Vivien dies in 1947, and Eliot jilts Emily, she informs him that she will donate all his personal correspondence to Princeton University.
He destroyed her letters, while she donated his to Princeton University, not to be opened for fifty years after the death of both.
Eliot, alarmed, responded with an illuminating three page covering letter, justifying his decisions, revealing a pettiness, unworthy of a great poet.
Eliot separated from Vivienne in 1928, then for a long time, he was in love—chastely, unconsummatedly—with a woman who was not his wife, a woman named Emily Hale. Then, overnight as it seemed, he wasn’t. For 17 years, she in America and he in England, they had been maintaining an intense, and intensely sublimated, attachment. They wrote hundreds of letters. They saw each other infrequently, and behaved, when they did, with appalling propriety
‘I tried to pretend that my love for you was dead, though I could only do so by pretending myself that my heart was dead,’
In 1932, on April 1, Eliot addresses Hale, as:
My dear lady. “Believe that though I am rushed, am not distracted from you in mood.” Early spring and late fall, are the two seasons most “troubling to my equilibrium” and “reviving of memories one must subdue.” Or to put it another way: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire.”
‘I tried to pretend that my love for you was dead, though I could only do so by pretending myself that my heart was dead,’.
In 1932, responding to a suggestion that they take a holiday together, he writes:
“two people in our position.” They must do nothing, which could raise the slightest suspicion in any mind however vulgar.”, but “age has not abated my passions.”
Emily and Eliot spent the night before she left for America together, with Eliot literally at Hale’s feet.
“I am filled with wretchedness and rejoicing,” he wrote, almost as soon as she was gone, “and when I go to bed I shall imagine you kissing me; and when you take off your stocking you must imagine me kissing your dear dear feet and striving to approach your beautiful saintly soul.”
Hale, by then teaching at Scripps College, was overworked, and her health, although she tried to hide it from Eliot, was faltering. Her neuritis made it difficult for her to write. It wasn’t only Eliot’s insatiable demand for letters that taxed her. She was growing attached to him, and he was still married. From 1931 to 1934, Hale suggested at least five times that Eliot consider divorcing his wife.
Eventually, Hale’s deteriorating health compelled her to take leave from Scripps. Only then did Eliot acknowledge his own hand in her collapse:
“by constantly pressing myself upon your attention, and importuning you with my correspondence, I was really tampering insidiously with your mind.” The melodrama of his self-censure—“I see myself as a blood-sucker”—is especially telling.
Like a vampire, he had not only drawn what he needed out of Hale but also, in the process, transformed her. She was falling in love.
As Eliot admitted to Hale:
“A woman usually wants a husband: some men want a kind of divinity, a sort of human surrogate for the B.V.M. [Blessed Virgin Mary] I have had this.”
Many poets conveniently choose a muse who has already died, who cannot set the terms for her compensation.
Hale wrote that instead of that “anticipated life together which could now rightfully be ours – something too personal … emotional for me to understand decided TSE against marrying me”.
This, Hale continued, “was both a shock and a sorrow”.
“Perhaps I could not have been the companion in marriage he hoped … Perhaps the vision saved both of us from great unhappiness – I cannot ever know.”
When Eliot jilted her in 1948, Emily was treated for a mental break down. She died in 1969.
Paul Sartre, Simone Beauvois #
The legend of Simone de Beauvoir—of how an obedient Catholic school girl cast off her rigid, patriarchal upbringing to become the high priestess of existential feminism—is often narrated as a love story. Her biographers trace her escape from the bourgeois Parisian milieu into which she was born, in 1908, first to the Sorbonne and then to the École Normale Supérieure. There, among the “graceless faces” of the agrégation candidates of 1929, she spied Jean-Paul Sartre, twenty-four years old and—as she rhapsodized in “Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter” (1958), the first of four autobiographical volumes—“still young enough to feel emotional about his future whenever he heard a saxophone playing after his third martini.”
Together, she and her “Playboy,” her “Leprechaun,” as she called him, chased life’s pleasures up the steps of Boulevard du Montparnasse, down the Avenue d’Orléans, and all around the woodland parks of Paris, where her parents had forbidden her and her sister to speak with children outside their social class. Beauvoir’s mother was devoted to the Church and its rigid moralism; her father detested intellectuals and wanted his oldest daughter to “marry a country cousin.” By the time she met Sartre, Beauvoir had different aspirations. “Never have I so loved to read and think, never have I been so alive and happy or envisioned a future so rich. Oh! Jean-Paul, dear Jean-Paul, thank you,” she wrote in her diary.
August 30, 2021, issue, The New Yorker with the headline “Sentimental Education.” by Merve Emre is a contributing writer.
Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir, shared a life of non-exclusive intellectual and sexual companionship. Rather than an open marriage, their pact included “to be one another’s ‘essential love’ with contingent lovers on the side”. Monogamy was vastly over-rated.
Beauvoir wanted:
“a Love that accompanies me through life; not that absorbs my life”.
De Beauvoir lost her teaching position as a result of her “suspicious living arrangements”. Sartre’s position remained safe.
Elizabeth Bishop #
M. Mark of Vasser College writes that Bishop was so ambivalent about homes because of her traumatic childhood when she was made to move homes, passed from parents, to grandparents to various aunts many times before she was seven, making her virtually homeless. Various near fatal sicknesses took their toll creating a sense of loss, dread and anxiety in navigating a modern world without a stable centre.
However, Bishop refuses to dump her emotions on the page by wallowing in self-pity. She wrote many drafts in order to get the precise topography of silence using a colloquial voice allows a light touch to convey hard truths with understated wisdom. Her elegant distillation of emotion is achieved by intimate conversations that shift and drift along effortlessly.
Despite Bishop’s “restraint, calm, and proportion,” she was entering a period when she seemed to be trying to drink herself to death. She spent many years under the care of her psychiatrist.
“When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived,” Bishop said to Robert Lowell.
Elizabeth Bishop’s life, through her letters, illustrates the consequences of a failure to deal with her issues; symptoms including alcholism, intense, tempestuous but fleeting love affairs, depression and suicidal tendencies. Much of her poetry attempts to exorcise the demons that lurked behind her protective shell, but haunted her entire sorrowful life of accumulated losses.
Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Losing by Claudia Roth Pierpont unearthed more biographical information from letters, especially to her Psychiatrist in the 1940’s.
Bishop had her first lesbian experience on a train to a summer camp at the age of fourteen.
Her first, of many serious intense relationships was with Marianne Moore (who also carried childhood trauma), largely professional, platonic but obviously love. M.M., as she affectionately called Moore, twenty years older, became her poetic mentor and her mother figure.
This is followed by a number of both male and female affairs lasting from a few years. When she rejected a marriage proposal from a young man, he sent her a postcard: “Go to hell Elizabeth”, before committing suicide.
Her longest and most tragic relationship, lasting some twenty years, was Lota, from Rio.
A highly talented Architect of the ruling class, Lota lost her high powered job due to a political coup, becoming depressed. By this time Bishop had started drinking heavily again and taken another lover. Lota became hysterical, was hospitalised, with Bishop told not to visit.
Bishop returned to America, Lota soon following. Despite an apparent reconciliation, Lota overdosed and later died in hospital.
Due to several harrowing experiences, Bishop drove toward alcoholic self-obliteration. yet at other times displayed a lively, engaging career, charged with vindicating energy.
Another newly disclosed group of letters, from the same source, documents a passionate love affair that Bishop began when she was nearing sixty, with a much younger woman, a relationship that lasted until the poet’s death, at sixty-eight, in 1979. (Bishop’s homosexuality was a carefully kept secret in the homophobic fifties and sixties.)
Her last loss, the young woman she was bound to lose, her attractive blond administrative assistant. It was widely recognised the two were lovers. When Alice announced she was leaving, Bishop’s distress became evident in a suicide attempt and increased alcohol abuse.
But it wasn’t a disaster, after all. Alice returned at winter’s end, and remained with Bishop until she died, of a brain aneurysm, a year and a half later.
Sylvia Plath - Ted Hughes #
Began with an intense passionate evening, a short courtship, a seven year marriage ending in two children, bitter recrimminations and her suicide in 1963.
More @: https://nebo-lit.com/poetry/hughes/ted-hughes-sylvia-plath.html
Leonard Cohen - Marianne Ihlen #
Leonard Cohen left Canada for London to advance his writing career. Finding the climate dull, grey, cold and dismal, he escaped to the Greek Island of Hydra where he met Marianne Ihlen from Norway. They shared a short passionate affair, before she left for home and he returned to start a musical career in North America.
More @ https://nebo-lit.com/love/marianne-cohen.html
Joan Baez - Bob Dylan #
As folk singers from the early sixties, they became lovers for many years. His break-up song was Don’t Think Twice, It’s alright, while she amicably reponded with Diamonds and Rust.