1 - The Rise and Fall of a Genre

Summary

GENERIC HISTORY

Between the middle of the fifteenth century and the middle of the seventeenth, there existed in Europe a ‘poetry of kissing’. Not every kiss which happened to appear in a poem belonged to this family, nor was it merely a class of poems with a common theme. The poetry of kissing was a distinct literary kind.

The great poet of kissing was the Dutchman Janus Secundus, who was born in 1511 and died, still a young man, in 1536. His collection of Basia (Kisses) initiated the basium genre, in which every poem was notionally a ‘kiss’. In his amatory works, of which the Basia were the most famous, the impression of earlier Neo-Latin poets is deep, and his debts are especially obvious when it comes to the theme of kissing. But, after all, it was Secundus who made a genre from a topos. After him came a great many imitators, including several who followed his example in the composition of whole sequences of ‘Basia’.

The kissing-poem had thus become a form in itself. But its mode travelled far beyond the bounds of the kiss-poem proper. It had a wider reach than one would likely at first suspect, and its influence was much more than a matter of the mere theme and its figures; less obvious qualities of tone, register, mood and vocabulary made the poetry of kissing a considerable force. The present study is not a consideration of ‘kisses in literature’, but rather of the artistic development, the rise and fall, of a genre. It is therefore primarily a matter of poetics. And since the genre was, in the widest sense, lyrical in form, this will be a book concerned nearly exclusively with lyric.

Even the parallel idiom derived from the Song of Songs, which tended independently to gather kisses into its atmosphere, and to determine the figures in which the image of the kiss was elsewhere frequently featured (in religious writing primarily), was not allowed to intrude into the basium kind—strangely, one might think, given that the writers of these kissingpoems were at such pains to produce copious variety in their thematic reformulations.