Introduction -- Beloved boys (and girls) -- Love scripts I, male bonding -- Love scripts II, poems about poetry about love -- Love, sex, and poetry -- Women and the art of love -- Seduction and reversal -- To die for . . . : love and violence in the age of beloveds -- Love, law, and religion -- The end of an age -- Renaissance, renaissances, and the age of beloveds -- Appendix : Ottoman sultans during the age of beloveds
The Islamic poetic tradition as it came to the Turks through Persian is characterized by a rather limited catalog of basic themes expressed by an equally limited number of standard tropes. The basic themes are usually quite easily recognizable (e.g. the sâkî theme, the bahâr theme, etc.), even though more than one basic theme may be included in a single poem. The standard tropes — for example, the moon for the face of the beloved, rubies for wine, drunkenness for mystical love — are also used over and over again without any serious attempt to freshen poetic expression by discarding them for new metaphores. Nevertheless, within this atmosphere of apparent similarity, contemporary critics placed high value on creativity, uniqueness, and the invention of 'new' fancies. Modern scholarship has, in most cases, attempted to resolve this paradox by stating that 'creativity' for the Ottoman poet consisted of rearranging and recombining traditional themes and tropes to create new patterns and, thereby, a subtle and precious uniqueness. Moreover, any internal cohesion or organization other than that provided by rhyme and meter is generally seen as fortuitous and unrelated to any conscious effort to present a unified poetic message. The result of this view is the rather pervasive conclusion that the Ottoman poet is no more creative than the child is 'creative' who operates a kaleidoscope which produces infinitely varied patterns, even though the mirrors (themes?) and colored bits of glass (tropes?) remain ever the same.
