Enjoyable, Peter.
Re Tim Atkins,
& Plant calls to page the weeping song
& springtime pure white pink blues
Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, frontmen of Led Zeppelin (cf the next line's reference to blues). "Weeping song" glances, I suppose, at "Rain Song", from the Houses of the Holy album, but a true Led Zep fan might know better.
Cod male hypersexed bluesmen perform tender love song.... You don't discuss why "the Petrarch boys" might want to engage with Petrarch in the first place, but surely there's some big themes being weighed here, not least masculinity, refication of women, libido, civilisation, ethics, idealism and realism, the possibility of modern love poetry.... I dffer from you in thinking that either poet values the contemporary over the antique: perhaps the opposite. But the poems are certainly about the contemporary, not the past.
I hadn't heard the expression "expanded translation" in this context before, and I don't think much of it: a positively misleading description of the various works under discussion. Hopefully the academic community will back off from that one.
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