The Evolution of the Love Poem | The New York Public Library (2024)

The poem is believed to have been used as part of a sacred ritual in which the king symbolically married a goddess named Inanna, a Sumerian goddess of love. The idea was this would ensure fertility and prosperity for the year.

It was likely recited by Shu Shin’s chosen bride. While it wasn’t love as we know it today, it was the ultimate representation of love between a monarch, his bride, and their god.

Bridegroom, dear to my heart,

Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet,

Lion, dear to my heart,

Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet.

You have captivated me, let me stand tremblingly before you.

Bridegroom, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber,

You have captivated me, let me stand tremblingly before you.

Lion, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber.

Before Kramer's discovery, The Song of Songs (sometimes called The Song of Solomon), which can be found in the Old Testament of the Bible, was believed to be the oldest love poem. The focus of that poem is the celebration of romantic and sexual love between two lovers. Various religious interpretations look at it is an allegory of the love between God and his followers.

Religion clearly played a strong role in these older poems, which indicates its importance to ancient people. But romantic love also had a level of importance. So that begs the question"How have love poems changed over the years?" They never ceased to exist but havedefinitely evolved.

In his article, "The Chemistry of Love Poetry," Tim Hanco*ck describeshow in love poetry "… different civilisations will each offer their own culturally determined perspective on love…" So, theconcept of love never changes but how we talk about it does.

William Shakespeare is universally recognized as the foremost writer in the English language to date.

The 37plays associated with his name, including the major tragediesHamlet, King Lear, Othello,andMacbeth,and his romances and comedies,Twelfth NightandA Midsummer Night's Dreamamong them, have been translated into many languages and have crossed all kinds of cultural divide.

His poetry, in particular his intricately woven and fiercely passionate love sonnets, have stirred the senses of reader and critic alike for generations past and will do so for generations to come. (courtesyBiography in Context)

Among all women poets of the English-speaking world in the 19thcentury, none was held in higher critical esteem or was more admired for the independence and courage of her views than Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

During the years of her marriage to Robert Browning, her literary reputation far surpassed that of her poet-husband; when visitors came to their home in Florence, she was invariably the greater attraction. Her humane and liberal point of view manifests itself in her poems aimed at redressing many forms of social injustice, such as the slave trade in America, the labor of children in the mines and the mills of England, the oppression of the Italian people by the Austrians, and the restrictions forced upon women in nineteenth-century society.(courtesy Biography in Context)

The Irish poet and dramatist W.B.Yeats was perhaps the greatest poet of the 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 and was the leader of the Irish Literary Renaissance.

His work forms a bridge between the romantic and often decadent poetry of the turn of the century, and the hard clear language of modern poetry. (courtesyBiography in Context)

Throughout much of her career, Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the most successful and respected poets in America. She is noted for both her dramatic works, including Aria da capo, The Lamp and the Bell, and the libretto composed for an opera, The King's Henchman, and for such lyric verses as "Renascence" and the poems found in the collections A Few Figs From Thistles, Second April, and The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.

Like her contemporary Robert Frost, Millay was one of the most skillful writers of sonnets in the 20th centuryand, also like Frost, she was able to combine modernist attitudes with traditional forms creating a unique American poetry. (courtesy Literature Resource Center)

During the Harlem Renaissance, when the work of African American writers was initially acknowledged as a significant feature of American literature, Langston Hughes achieved a position of prominence that eventually led to his recognition as "the Laureate of Black America."

A wider historical perspective indicates that Hughes was an important contributor to an American poetic renaissance in which a singularly American voice—initially introduced by Walt Whitman—emerged as a distinct variant to the lingering strain of the British tradition still dominant in the United States. He was driven by a desire to "explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America," and he was a pioneer in combining the rhythms of street speech, the blues, and the language of the black community with the formal patterns and structural conventions of the traditional English poetry he had mastered. (courtesyBiography in Context)

Widely regarded as the most important contemporary Latin American poet of the 20thcentury, Pablo Neruda was noted for his innovative techniques and influential contributions to major developments in modern poetry, both in his native Chile and abroad. Due to the difficulty of accurately translating his works, only a small body of his poems hasbeen rendered into English and, often in multiple forms that prompt critical debate regarding their relative quality or accuracy.

Although translations of his works have existed since the 1940s, Neruda remained relatively unknown to English-speaking readers prior to the appearance of several of his works in the early 1960s and his being honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.(courtesy Literature Resource Center)

Sylvia Plath is renowned as one of the most powerful American poets of the postwar period. Her acclaimed poetry and prose are characterized by intense self-consciousness, accusatory despair, and disquieting expressions of futility and frustration.

A complicated literary personality whose biography is nearly impossible to disentangle from her writing, Plath is frequently regarded as a confessional poet, though her deeply personal lamentations often achieve universality through mythic allusion and archetypal symbolism. Viewed as a cathartic response to her divided personae as an artist, mother, and wife, Plath's vivid and often shocking verse reveals the psychological torment associated with feelings of alienation, inadequacy, and abandonment. (courtesyLiterature Resource Center)

Oneof the best-known American poets of our time, Nikki Giovanni's work rose to prominence during the late 1960s and early 1970s when she was closely associated with the Black Arts Movement. Influenced by the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, the activists of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and her grandmother Louvenia Watson, Giovanni's poetry illustrates her growth and evolution as a woman of color and as a poet.

Able to write from the intersections of activist, teacher, mother, daughter, and granddaughter, her voice fluctuates between anger and humor in its commentary on her consistent themes of community, family, justice, self-awareness, consciousness, and love. She has written for both adults and children, and, together with her live and recorded performances, her work is well-known and recited throughout the country. (courtesyLiterature Resource Center)