The Poetry of Friendship

Abstract Using the chapter ‘De l’amitié’ from Montaigne’s Essais as a guide to the qualities of friendship, this article compares, on one hand, the qualities of seventeenth-century poems of direct address in which the poet assumes a position of friendship with respect to the person addressed to the qualities, on the other hand, of poems claiming love as the basis of the relationship between speaker and explicit reader. Though a category ‘poetry of friendship’ is not so widely accepted as ‘love poems’, this brief note suggests that such a type of poem does exist and that it is dominated by themes of consolation and admonition.