THE AFTERLIFE OF COURTLY LOVE: STRUCTURAL WHITENESS AND THE CRISIS OF THE MODERN LYRIC
A Study in Form, Race, and the Collapse of Romantic Paradigms
ABSTRACT
This article argues that the medieval courtly love tradition established structural patterns that persisted into modern lyric poetry, becoming increasingly racialized as "whiteness" emerged as a cultural category. Drawing on scholarship in medieval literature, critical race theory, affect studies, and contemporary lyric theory, I demonstrate that courtly love functioned as what might be termed an "operating system" for Western poetic desire—a set of formal and affective protocols governing the representation of longing, belovedness, and transcendence. The article traces this system's evolution from the troubadours through Romanticism and modernism, examines its racialization in the twentieth century, and identifies Lou Reed's 1960s work as a crucial site of structural critique. I conclude by suggesting that the collapse of courtly love's organizing principles creates both crisis and possibility for contemporary poetry, requiring new frameworks for representing desire beyond the exhausted paradigms of distance, abjection, and unattainability.
Keywords: courtly love, lyric poetry, whiteness studies, Lou Reed, affect theory, medieval reception, poetic form
I. INTRODUCTION: THE PERSISTENCE OF MEDIEVAL FORMS
In 1936, C.S. Lewis observed that medieval allegory's most enduring legacy was not its surface conventions but its deep structures—"habits of thought" that "long survived the actual use of allegory."[1] This article extends Lewis's insight to courtly love, arguing that the troubadour tradition established affective and formal patterns that structured Western lyric poetry for nearly a millennium, surviving long after explicit courtly conventions disappeared.
Recent scholarship has increasingly recognized the courtly love tradition's formative influence on Western subjectivity. Sarah Kay notes that troubadour poetry "created paradigms of desire that remain culturally active,"[2] while Denis de Rougemont famously argued that courtly love "invented" romantic passion as we know it.[3] Yet these accounts typically treat courtly love as content—a theme or ideology—rather than as form, as structure, as what I term an "operating system" governing how desire could be poetically articulated.
This article makes three interconnected arguments:
First, courtly love established not merely conventions but protocols—formal requirements governing the representation of desire that functioned beneath conscious awareness, structuring possibility rather than merely influencing content.
Second, these protocols became increasingly racialized in modernity, mapping onto emergent categories of whiteness in ways that made "the pale beloved" simultaneously a medieval inheritance and a racial formation.
Third, the late twentieth century witnessed the collapse of this system, with Lou Reed's work representing a crucial turning point—not merely thematic critique but structural demolition of courtly love's organizing principles.
[1] C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 44.
[2] Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3.
[3] Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 15.
II. COURTLY LOVE AS OPERATING SYSTEM: THE MEDIEVAL PROTOCOLS
A. Beyond Convention: Structure and Protocol
The scholarly literature on courtly love is extensive,[4] but has typically focused on its historical contexts, gender politics, or influence on particular authors. What has received less attention is courtly love's function as a formal system—a set of protocols governing not what could be said but how desire could be structured poetically.
Barbara Newman identifies several "structural constants" in troubadour poetry:
- The beloved's social and spiritual superiority
- The lover's abject service (fin'amor)
- Distance as constitutive of desire
- Suffering as ennobling
- The unattainability of the beloved[5]
These are not themes but requirements—formal constraints as rigid as the sonnet form. A poem violated these protocols at the cost of unintelligibility. As Joan Ferrante argues, courtly love created "a grammar of desire" that subsequent poetry was compelled to use.[6]
Crucially, these protocols operated on multiple levels:
Formal level: Distance between lover and beloved generates the temporal structure (longing, deferral, potential fulfillment/permanent loss).
Affective level: The lover's abjection produces specific emotional registers (yearning, melancholy, noble suffering).
Ontological level: The beloved functions as transcendent object rather than subject, more concept than person.
Economic level: Desire operates through scarcity logic—the beloved's value derives from her unattainability.[7]
These structural requirements created what we might call, following contemporary systems theory, an "operating system"—a set of low-level protocols determining what programs (individual poems) could run and how they could function.
[4] For overview, see Simon Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
[5] Barbara Newman, "Flaws in the Golden Bowl: Gender and Spiritual Formation in the Twelfth Century," Traditio 45 (1989-90): 111-46.
[6] Joan M. Ferrante, "Cortes'Amor in Medieval Texts," Speculum 55.4 (1980): 686-95.
[7] For economic reading of courtly love, see R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 189-212.
B. The Beloved as Non-Subject
A crucial protocol: the beloved must not be a subject.
This is not merely gender subordination (though it is that) but a formal requirement. The beloved functions as what Alfred North Whitehead would call an "eternal object"—a fixed point around which the lover's subjectivity orbits.[8] As Frederick Goldin demonstrates, troubadour ladies are "rarely individualized"; they exist as "projections of ideal beauty."[9]
This non-subjectivity is essential to the system's operation. If the beloved were granted genuine subjectivity—her own desires, contradictions, agency—the system would collapse. The lyric requires her as icon, not person. As Sarah Kay notes, "the lady's refusal is structurally necessary" because reciprocity would eliminate the distance on which the entire system depends.[10]
This has profound implications for the tradition's afterlife in modernity.
[8] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 22-23.
[9] Frederick Goldin, The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 42.
[10] Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, 88-89.
III. THE COURTLY KERNEL IN MODERNITY: SURVIVAL AND TRANSFORMATION
A. Romanticism's Inheritance
The Romantic period might seem to break with medieval conventions—greater emotional intensity, nature imagery, democratic sentiment. Yet the structural protocols persist. As M.H. Abrams documents in Natural Supernaturalism, Romanticism "internalized" courtly paradigms without abandoning them.[11]
Consider Wordsworth's Lucy poems, Shelley's "Epipsychidion," Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci," or Byron's various beloveds. In each:
- The beloved remains distant (through death, departure, or nature)
- The lover experiences ennobling suffering
- Reciprocity is absent or tragic
- Transcendence is sought through longing
The beloved has been naturalized (she is nature, she is death, she is inspiration) but remains fundamentally non-reciprocal, fundamentally Other.[12]
Anne K. Mellor argues that Romantic poetry "silences women as speaking subjects" even while elevating them as objects of devotion.[13] This is not accidental but structural—a continuation of courtly love's core protocol.
[11] M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), 183-234.
[12] For detailed analysis, see Susan J. Wolfson, "Feminizing Keats," in Critical Essays on John Keats, ed. Hermione de Almeida (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990), 317-56.
[13] Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1-20.
B. Modernism's Ironization (That Preserves the Structure)
Modernism appears to break more decisively with tradition. T.S. Eliot's fragmented speaker, Pound's imagistic precision, Williams's "no ideas but in things"—all seem distant from troubadour conventions.
Yet as Helen Vendler observes, even modernist anti-lyric preserves "structures of longing."[14] Consider:
- Eliot's "La Figlia Che Piange" (courtly distance ironized but maintained)
- Pound's repeated Provençal references and use of the donna figure
- Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West" (feminine muse, male philosophical observer)
- Yeats's Maud Gonne poems (medieval imagery explicit)
Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins argue that modernism's "invention of lyric reading" actually strengthened certain medieval assumptions by making them seem timeless and natural rather than historically contingent.[15] The lyric "I" addressing an absent "you" becomes the form's essence rather than a specific tradition.
What modernism adds is irony—but irony that preserves rather than dissolves the underlying structure. The lover may be self-aware about his abjection, but abjection remains the position from which desire can be articulated.
[14] Helen Vendler, The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 2-8.
[15] Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, "Lyrical Studies," Victorian Literature and Culture 27.2 (1999): 521-30. See also Jackson's Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
C. The Post-War Singer-Songwriter: Re-Medievalization
The mid-twentieth century singer-songwriter tradition represents, paradoxically, a return to explicit courtly forms. As Simon Frith notes, folk and folk-rock traditions "re-romanticized" popular music after the sexual directness of rock and roll.[16]
Dylan's songs frequently feature distant, idealized beloveds; Cohen's work makes the troubadour parallel explicit; Mitchell's lyrics often explore the beloved-as-muse dynamic. The tradition restores the distant, idealized beloved, the suffering lover, the unattainability that ennobles.
This re-medievalization prepared the ground for the system's collapse by making its structures explicit and therefore vulnerable to critique.
[16] Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 169-82.
IV. THE RACIALIZATION OF THE COURTLY BELOVED: WHITENESS AS FORM
A. The Medieval "Pale Lady"
Medieval troubadour poetry consistently described the beloved as pale: white skin, light hair, luminous.[17] This was initially class-coded (aristocratic women remained indoors, avoiding sun) and theologically symbolic (purity, divine light).[18]
But as Geraldine Heng argues, even medieval "racial thinking" was already operative in aesthetic hierarchies.[19] The pale lady was not merely beautiful but represented a specific kind of superiority—one that would later become explicitly racialized.
As the courtly love tradition migrated into modernity, "paleness" increasingly mapped onto emerging categories of whiteness. The beloved's distance, purity, fragility, and unattainability became not merely courtly conventions but racial aesthetics.
[17] Medieval examples: Bernart de Ventadorn's descriptions, Andreas Capellanus's Art of Courtly Love, the Roman de la Rose.
[18] Madeleine Jeay, "The Discourse of Desire in the Middle Ages," in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, ed. Margaret Schaus (New York: Routledge, 2006), 232-33.
[19] Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 8-47.
B. Whiteness Studies and Affective Structures
Critical whiteness studies has demonstrated how whiteness operates not merely as identity but as structure, form, and affect.[20] Richard Dyer's foundational work identifies whiteness with:
- Transcendence and ideality
- Emotional restraint and distance
- Fragility requiring protection
- Invisibility (whiteness as norm, not marked category)
- Death (paleness as proximity to death)[21]
These characteristics map precisely onto the courtly beloved's required attributes. The troubadour's distant lady and the twentieth-century racialized "white woman" share:
- Distance as constitutive: Cannot be approached directly
- Fragility: Requires protection, easily damaged
- Emotional impermeability: Does not reciprocate openly
- Idealization: Represents transcendent value
- Paleness: Literally and metaphorically
Sara Ahmed's work on "orientation" provides additional framework. She argues that whiteness structures "what is reachable" and "what appears" as valuable.[22] The courtly beloved functions similarly—she determines what can be desired and how desire can be expressed.
Toni Morrison's insight is crucial: whiteness in literature operates through what is unsaid, through structural position rather than explicit content.[23] The courtly beloved's whiteness (once established) becomes infrastructure—the unmarked norm around which desire organizes itself.
[20] For overview, see Ruth Frankenberg, ed., Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
[21] Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997), 14-81.
[22] Sara Ahmed, "A Phenomenology of Whiteness," Feminist Theory 8.2 (2007): 149-68.
[23] Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 4-15.
C. The Twentieth Century: Explicit Racialization
By the twentieth century, the courtly beloved's paleness had become explicitly racialized. Consider the modernist and post-war canon:
- Eliot's hyacinth girl (fragile, distant)
- Stevens's repeated pale female figures
- Plath's exploration of whiteness as death and purity
- The prevalence of light-haired beloveds in mid-century poetry[24]
More significantly, the structural characteristics of courtly love—distance, unattainability, fragility, emotional impermeability—became legible as racialized femininity. As Cheryl Harris argues, whiteness functioned as property, something to be possessed but never fully accessed.[25]
Lauren Berlant's concept of "cruel optimism" applies: attachment to objects (the beloved) that actually obstruct flourishing, maintained because the alternative seems worse.[26] The courtly beloved, now explicitly racialized, becomes an attachment that prevents genuine reciprocity while promising impossible transcendence.
The system was ready to collapse under its own contradictions.
[24] For analysis, see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988-94).
[25] Cheryl I. Harris, "Whiteness as Property," Harvard Law Review 106.8 (1993): 1707-91.
[26] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 1-28.
V. LOU REED AND THE STRUCTURAL CRITIQUE
A. The Velvet Underground's Anti-Romantic Project
Lou Reed's work with the Velvet Underground (1964-70) has been extensively analyzed for its transgressive content—drugs, sexuality, urban decay.[27] What has received less attention is its formal intervention in lyric structure.
Reed's lyrics systematically violate courtly love protocols:
Distance collapsed: Songs explore intimacy and reciprocity rather than distant longing
Abjection refused: Speakers possess agency and self-awareness
Transcendence denied: Desire exists in material, urban contexts rather than idealized realms
The beloved as subject: Female figures are granted agency, complexity, even danger
As Philip Shaw notes, Reed's aesthetic was "systematically opposed to romantic sublimation."[28] But this opposition wasn't merely thematic—it was structural. Reed was dismantling the operating system itself.
[27] Victor Bockris, Transformer: The Lou Reed Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); Richie Unterberger, White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day (London: Jawbone Press, 2009).
[28] Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London: Routledge, 2006), 128-29.
B. "Pale Blue Eyes": The System's Auto-Critique
Reed's 1969 song "Pale Blue Eyes" represents his most sophisticated intervention. The song appears to be straightforward romantic balladry—acoustic guitar, tender vocal, traditional verse structure. Yet it systematically exposes and critiques every courtly love protocol through several key structural moves:
1. Foregrounding racial-aesthetic coding: The title itself makes paleness visible rather than natural, denaturalizing what courtly love made infrastructure.
2. Longing as entrapment: Rather than ennobling suffering, the song presents desire as stasis, an inability to move forward.
3. Exposing projection: The song explicitly frames the beloved's transcendence as the speaker's construction ("thought of you as..."), making the projection visible and thereby collapsing the system's naturalization of idealization.
4. Past tense temporality: Where courtly love requires perpetual present-tense longing, Reed uses past tense consistently, suggesting that the end of this mode of desire is possible.
5. Confession of inadequacy: The song acknowledges that the courtly love structure itself—possession/loss logic—is inadequate, not noble.
6. Conditional futurity: The song imagines alternative modes of relation while acknowledging they remain unrealized.
The song's power lies not in rejecting romanticism (many artists did that) but in performing the collapse of courtly love's operating system from within. It demonstrates that the protocols no longer generate meaning, no longer enable genuine relation. The system has exhausted itself.
Anahid Kassabian's analysis of affect in popular music is relevant here: certain songs don't just represent emotions but restructure affective possibilities.[29] "Pale Blue Eyes" restructures desire itself, making it impossible to return to courtly paradigms without self-conscious irony.
[29] Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 88-112.
VI. THE AFTERMATH: CRISIS AND POSSIBILITY IN CONTEMPORARY LYRIC
A. The Exhaustion of Available Forms
Contemporary poetry faces a crisis: the dominant forms for representing desire have collapsed, but no stable alternatives have emerged. As Jonathan Culler notes, the lyric finds itself "without a clear generic identity."[30]
Several responses are visible in contemporary work:
1. Neo-formalism: Attempting to restore courtly structures through irony or pastiche (ultimately reinforcing what they critique)[31]
2. Anti-lyric: Refusing personal voice entirely (Language poetry, conceptual writing)—but this evacuates the affective dimension that made lyric culturally powerful[32]
3. Confessionalism 2.0: Intensifying personal disclosure (Instagram poetry, etc.)—but without structural innovation, often replicating courtly dynamics in new media[33]
4. Fragmentation: Leaving desire unrepresented, focusing instead on language materiality or abstract pattern
None of these fully resolve the crisis because they don't address the structural problem: we lack protocols for representing reciprocal, non-transcendent, materially-grounded desire that doesn't rely on distance, abjection, or idealization.
[30] Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 4-9.
[31] See Stephen Burt, "The Contemporary Poet's Relation to the Tradition," in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 625-40.
[32] For critique, see Helen Vendler, "The Mediated Vision: Stevens, Williams, and Dante," in Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 3-17.
[33] Analysis of social media poetry's formal conservatism in Rebecca Watts, "The Cult of the Noble Amateur," PN Review 44.4 (2018): 52-57.
B. Toward New Protocols: Non-Courtly Desire
What would a non-courtly lyric require? Based on the structural critique developed above:
1. Reciprocity as constitutive (not distance)
- Both parties as subjects
- Mutual transformation acknowledged
- Dialogue rather than monologue
2. Material grounding (not transcendence)
- Bodies, not ideals
- Specific contexts, not universal longing
- Practical care, not symbolic worship
3. Contradiction-bearing (not purity)
- Multiple, conflicting desires acknowledged
- Imperfection as given, not failure
- Non-identity maintained
4. Horizontal relation (not hierarchy)
- Neither abjection nor superiority
- Neither possession nor impossibility
- Equality in difference
5. Temporality of process (not perpetual present)
- Change over time
- Learning and adjustment
- Endings possible without tragedy
These requirements suggest a radical reformation of lyric possibility. Such work would not be "confessional" (which maintains the isolated speaking subject) nor "anti-lyric" (which abandons affect) but something genuinely new: a reciprocal, materialist, contradiction-bearing lyric.
C. Race, Form, and the Future Lyric
Crucially, this transformation requires addressing courtly love's racialization. As Claudia Rankine's Citizen demonstrates, contemporary lyric must confront how whiteness structures affective possibility.[34] A post-courtly lyric cannot simply replace pale beloveds with diverse ones while maintaining the same formal structures—that would leave the protocols intact.
Instead, we need forms that:
- Refuse transcendence (the escape from materiality that whiteness promises)
- Embrace contradiction (the complexity that purity-logic denies)
- Practice reciprocity (the mutual recognition that distance prevents)
- Acknowledge power (the asymmetries that idealization masks)
This is not merely political but formal work. Race operates at the level of structure, not just content. Changing who appears in poems without changing how desire can be represented reproduces the problem.
Recent work by poets including Claudia Rankine, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, and Solmaz Sharif suggests possible directions—forms that maintain lyric intensity while refusing courtly protocols.[35] But the structural innovation required remains largely unachieved.
[34] Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014).
[35] For analysis of formal innovation in contemporary poetry, see Stephanie Burt and David Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), especially the discussion of contemporary departures from tradition.
VII. CONCLUSION: AFTER COURTLY LOVE
This article has traced the courtly love tradition's persistence as an "operating system" for Western lyric, its increasing racialization in modernity, and its collapse in the late twentieth century. Lou Reed's work, particularly "Pale Blue Eyes," represents a crucial site where this collapse becomes visible—not merely as thematic critique but as structural exhaustion.
The contemporary moment is characterized by crisis: the available forms for representing desire have been exposed as inadequate, but stable alternatives have not emerged. This creates both danger and possibility.
The danger is regression—attempts to restore courtly forms through irony or nostalgia, or the evacuation of desire from poetry entirely.
The possibility is genuine innovation—the development of new protocols for representing reciprocal, materially-grounded, contradiction-bearing desire that doesn't rely on the exhausted courtly paradigms.
This formal innovation is inseparable from racial justice. Courtly love's operating system has been so thoroughly racialized that any post-courtly lyric must simultaneously address how whiteness has structured affective and formal possibility. We cannot simply replace the content (who appears as beloved) while maintaining the structure (how belovedness functions). The protocols themselves must be rebuilt.
Such reconstruction is already underway in contemporary poetry, though its outcomes remain uncertain. What is clear is that we are living through the end of a millennium-long tradition. The courtly love operating system—with its protocols of distance, abjection, idealization, and unattainability—no longer generates meaningful poetry. It has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and its implication in structures of racial domination.
We are in the aftermath. What comes next depends on whether poets can develop genuinely new forms—structures for representing desire that are reciprocal rather than distant, material rather than transcendent, contradiction-bearing rather than pure, horizontal rather than hierarchical.
The future lyric, if there is to be one, must be post-courtly. This article has traced why and how the old system collapsed. The work of building the new one has only begun.
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Author Bio: [To be determined based on publication venue]
Acknowledgments: This research was conducted independently. I am grateful to scholars whose published work made this argument possible, though all interpretations and errors remain my own.
