A Book of Love Poetry

Front Cover
Jon Stallworthy
OUP USA, Dec 11, 1986 - Family & Relationships - 393 pages
From the civilization of the Lower Nile to that of the Lower Hudson, more poets have written more convincingly, more poignantly about love than about any other subject. Jon Stallworthy has here selected some of the most moving, funny, shameless, and erotic love poems in the English language. Representing the work of more than 190 poets, from Sappho to Byron and Browning, from Rossetti to Wordsworth and E.E. Cummings, he offers a startling collection of love poetry down through the ages. Arranged thematically, beginning with the first drawings of young love and ending with the "long look back" of the aged, and revealing love in all its different aspects and perversities, this anthology demonstrates vividly man's changeless responses to the changing seasons of the heart. "Stallworthy's book of love poetry, ranging across more than twenty centuries of writing about love 'till the stars have run away' establishes beyond the eye-shadow of a doubt that love is, has been and always will be blind."—Christian Science Monitor "A very thorough job...eccentric and entertaining."—Times Literary Supplement (London)
 

Contents

INTRODUCTION
19
EZRA POUND Commission
29
W B YEATS Brown Penny
36
AUSTIN CLARKE Penal Law
44
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI The First Day
50
A Sort of Love
55
LORD BYRON She Walks in Beauty
61
EDMUND SPENSER Iambicum Trimetrum
67
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR You smiled you spoke
218
ANON Walking in a meadow green
225
ROBERT BURNS A Red Red Rose
231
ROBERT BROWNING The Lost Mistress
238
JOHN GAY Sweet Williams Farewell to Blackeyed
244
HAROLD MONRO The Terrible Door
248
ALEXANDER POPE Epistle to Miss Blount on
254
LADY HEGURI A thousand years you said
260

ROBERT HERRICK To the Virgins to Make Much
75
JOHN KEATS This living hand now warm and capable
88
Chapter 2
97
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI Sudden Light
102
ROBERT BROWNING from In a Gondola
108
OVID Elegy 5
114
THOMAS CAREW On the Marriage of T K and C C
120
WALT WHITMAN From pentup aching rivers
135
RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN The Geranium
139
CATULLUS Phyllis Corydon clutched to him
145
WILLIAM DAVENANT Under the WillowShades
152
ROBERT GRAVES She Tells Her Love While Half
158
ROBERT GRAVES The Quiet Glades of Eden
164
ROBERT CREELEY The
167
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE The Mirabeau Bridge
173
SIR WALTER SCOTT An Hour with Thee
179
W B YEATS A Last Confession
185
SIR JOHN HARINGTON Of an Heroical Answer of
190
THOMAS RANDOLPH Phyllis
196
EZRA POUND The Temperaments
202
GEORGE WITHER A Lovers Resolution
210
MARTIAL Lycóris darling once I burned for you
216
Your love is dead lady your
266
SIR HENRY WOTTON Upon the Death of Sir Albert
272
ANDREW MARVELL The Definition of Love
278
DONALD JUSTICE In Bertrams Garden
284
A E HOUSMAN When I was oneandtwenty
292
WILLIAM BLAKE The Sick Rose
294
LOUIS MACNEICE Les Sylphides
301
ROBERT GRAVES Call It a Good Marriage
307
W B YEATS When You Are Old
315
ALEXANDER SCOTT A Rondel of Love
320
W B YEATS Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
328
EDWIN MORGAN Strawberries
334
WILLIAM SOUTAR The Trysting Place
340
SIR THOMAS WYATT Remembrance
347
ROBERT LOWELL The Old Flame
353
EDGAR ALLAN POE TO One in Paradise
360
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR Rose Aylmer
367
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI Echo
368
Index of Titles and First Lines
379
99
392
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About the author (1986)

Jon Stallworthy was born on January 18, 1935 in London, England. He served as second lieutenant in the Nigeria Regiment of the West African Frontier Force in the mid-1950s. After completing his national service, he studied English literature at Magdalen College, Oxford University, where he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem The Earthly Paradise in 1958. His first collection of poetry, The Astronomy of Love, was published in 1961. His other collections of poetry include Root and Branch, Hand in Hand, A Familiar Tree, The Anzac Sonata, The Guest from the Future, Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems, Body Language, and War Poet. He received the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award in 2010 in recognition of his sustained body of work as a poet. He also wrote an autobiography entitled Singing School: The Making of a Poet. He wrote biographies about several poets including Wilfred Owen, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Blok, Herbert Read, and Geoffrey Dearmer. His biography of Louis MacNeice won the Southern Arts Literature Prize. He edited several collections of poetry including The Penguin Book of Love Poetry, The Oxford Book of War Poetry, and Complete Poems and Fragments. He also taught English literature at Cornell University and Wolfson College, Oxford University. He died on November 19, 2014 at the age of 79.

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