Popular modern interest in the lyrics of the Middle Ages begins with Ezra Pound's curious little book The Spirit of Romance, a pastiche of lovely translations and often borrowed opinions that even in 1910 the poet realized could be considered a work of comparative literature “only by courtesy.” Prior to Pound's bold if slightly amateurish sally in pages that still sing with the excitement of his own apprenticeship, medieval lyrics had passed through three major phases of historical regard: contempt, feverish enthusiasm and calm. The sixteenth century had remarked their supposed naïvete with derision. Romantics of the early nineteenth century gushed over their portrayals of chivalry, magic and martyred love with an ignorant hallucinatory elation. This voluptuous hysteria subsided with the Victorian Age. The smokestacks of Birmingham and Pittsburgh smothered any cloudless vision. Modern slums rendered senseless the heroic passion. Even Tennyson's King Arthur, a creature of faultless verse, sailed off toward Avalon less as a foredoomed leader than as a neurotic industrialist wrapped in smog. The upshot was a restful public perception of medieval lyrics as poems easiest appreciated among tulips and slippers, or in the semi- dark of the hushed choir stall.

Scholars had always known better of course. If they did not concur with Pound that all poems ought to provide “some form of ecstasy” (what on earth does such a statement mean?), at least they were aware of the vast variety of the medieval lyric output, of its treasury of glittering ornaments, its peculiar vigor, its gargoyles, its grotesques, its ravishing sensitivity to the first rays of dawn and the invitations of twilight. Illicit love, one of the delicious themes of the troubadours and trouvères, thrived in the secret closets of palaces. The pangs of unsatisfied longing, an emotion more thoroughly explored by medieval lyric poets than by any poets ever since, invoked isolated gardens, desolate adorations, crusades and ships that never returned. Gaston de Paris, who probably invented the term “courtly love,” and F. Diez, P. Meyer, Karl Burdach and J. Beck (all in Germany) were busy examining the fascinating medieval concept of amor mixtus (love of body and spirit combined). This concept was unknown in ancient Roman and Greek poetry, and remains a novelty in modern poetry too.