Popular love poems, from classic to contemporary, to share for weddings and anniversaries, on Valentine’s Day, and year-round. These poems are perfect for to express romantic love, a lovely friendship, or a love that’s complicated.
Love Poems
Essays on Love & Poetry
Poetic Pairings
Learn how to pair the perfect poem with sweets, drinks, and flora for your partner on Valentine's Day.
read more
Eros and the Lyric Imagination
by Marilyn Hacker
Eros is often the fuel of the lyric imagination, which chooses to use words, sentences, musical structures of language to re/member the beloved, to enter that inexhaustible source of—not uniquely “carnal”—knowledge which is another person’s body and mind.
read more
All My Poems Are Love Poems: When Two Poets Fall in Love
Love poetry is about as old as love itself, from Homer’s vision of Penelope’s steadfastness, to the biblical Song of Solomon, to Shakespeare’s sonnets for his “Dark Lady” (or, some speculate, Dark Lord), to Keats’s love songs for his own depression. Most poets, at one time or another, write their way into the hearts of their chosen partners, but sometimes something slightly more unusual happens: two poets fall in love with each other.
read more
Dear Dainty Delicious Darlings
To poets such as Lewis Carroll, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Charles Olson, Alexander Pope, Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, and W. B. Yeats, love letters were the means by which they could send “A hundred thousand kisses, darling!” (Joyce) or just “a hundred and eighty-two” (Carroll), whether they had been “prepared by drinking” (Pope) or written “wildly...not stopping to think” (Dunbar). Read letters to and from these poets and more.
read more
Books of Love Poetry
Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets, edited by Brett Fletcher Lauer and Aimee Kelley
Collected Sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay
For Love by Robert Creeley