The reading of the beloved in Pierre de Ronsard and W. B. Yeats

Abstract

This essay shows how the fictionalization commonly found in the sonnets by Pierre de Ronsard and W.B. Yeats, the encounter between the beloved woman and the poem addressed to her, is a reflection about the conventions of Petrarchan amatory discourse. In tracing the specific conditions of the literary experience described in each one of those texts, ranging from ancient rhetorical questions to reading practices and concepts of authorship, it suggests that poetic self-reflexivity entails its own historicization. Lyric poetry appears as a privileged medium for the discursive articulation of intimacy and subjectivity in the modern period.