Love's Aspects: The World's Great Love Poems

by Jean Garrigue

This is a collection of some of the world’s greatest love poems. The old standbys are here, of From England and pre-20th Century Shakespeare (still possibly the greatest of them all), John Donne, Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, Milton, Herrick, Marvell, Lovelace, Tennyson, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Swinburne, Wordsworth, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Edward Arlington Robinson, and many more. From Padraic Colum (20th C), James Joyce (20th C), and William Butler Yeats (19th-20th Cs). From Robert Burns (18th C) and Edwin Muir (20th C); and from Dylan Thomas (20th C). There are poets who didn’t write in English (translated): Hans Christian Andersen (Danish, 19th century), Dante Alighieri (13-14th Cs), plus Cino da Pistoia (13th C), Petrarca (Petrarch, 14th C), Giovanni Battista Guarini (16th C), and Torquato Tasso (16th C); Baudelaire and Rimbaud (19th C), Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard, Valery Larbaud, (all 20th C); Federico Garcia Lorca, Jaime Torres Bodet, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Emilio Prados (all 20th century); plus Latin American (all 20th C): Vincente Huidobro, Gabriela Mistral, and Pablo Neruda (all Chilean); Francisco López Merino (Argentinean, 20th C), César Vallejo (Peruvian), Angel Miguel Queremel (Venezuelan), and Salomón de la Selva (Nicaraguan). Also medieval and 18th century Germans plus Rainer Maria Rilke (20th C); and poets who wrote in modern Greek, Russian, and Hebrew. From the ancient or almost ancient world : Ancient Sappho (7th C. BC), Meleager (1st C. BC), Ancient Catullus and Horace (both Roman, 1st century BC), and even Chinese (Li Po, 8th century). Modern English and Alex Comfort, Robert Graves, D.H. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Conrad Aiken, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, e.e. Cummings, and too many others to list.

Genres: Poetry

413 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Jean Garrigue (born Gertrude Louise Garrigus) was an American poet.

Reviews

[Delanie Dooms · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know what to say here.
I mean, there are a ton of love poems. What else can I say?
Obviously, it doesn't necessarily reach the goal of "the world's great love poems," but that is an impossible task, anyway, especially when most of these poems come from Italy, Spain, America, and Britain, thus really hindering the whole "world" approach. But, even more than that--new poets arise every day, so assuredly the list of poems would be longer every day after this book's publication!
Some of the poets I personally enjoy were not included, or not included often. Aphra Behn and Christina Rossetti, both poets who wrote upon love, were not here to my remembrance, for example.
I found a number of the poems rather bad--but Herrick, Hardy, Dickinson, and Whitman's poems were almost universally good, and I imagine that other readers will easily find delight in things held within these pages.
Therefore, I recommend it.