Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Platonic Lover Of Elizabethan Poetry., Dorcas Douglass Ray

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Just what is the meaning of Platonic love? It is a term that has caught the attention of scholars, poets, and plain men, in many countries and during many centuries. Perhaps its wide appeal accounts for the varied and tortuous shapes its meaning has assumed as it has passed through the inquisitive and often callous fingers of the multitudes. It is a term applied popularly today to a kind of abstract, passionless friendship, which, to the practical-minded American, can exist only in theory. Few who use the term Platonic love or Platonic friendship have paused first to read the pages …