A Year of Love Poetry, Day-by-Day

What a year it has been.... I started this project exactly one year ago with several objectives in mind.  The principal one was to create ...

My apartment had a devastating fire on December 22, 2010, which made it uninhabitable and destroyed my poetry library (pictured below in wha...

With this selection, Amichai solidifies his lead as the most represented poet here.  And deservedly.  (Do "click" on his name on t...

This comes from an anthology of women poets and a compilation of old traditional songs from the area of Fez that would be sung by a chorus o...

A Roman Consul, courtier, and "fashion-advisor" to Emperor Nero, Gaius Petronius  (27- 66 C.E., also known as Petronius Arbiter) ...

(Note: READ the poem FIRST, before this commentary.) Delmira Agustini (1887 - 1914)... She was a rising poet in Uruguay, known for orig...

Another by Ezra Pound (see other for bio info) and possibly my favorite of all of his poems, perhaps because of its accessibility and stylis...

As mentioned in earlier post, John Berryman's (1914 - 1972) 115 sonnets were an accounting of the course of a love affair with a married...

It’s always a delight when a poet of Galway Kinnell’s (1927-2014) stature addresses romantic love, particularly when better known for tyi...

If this is the only Roethke poem you will read here, you'll be doing yourself a disservice.  Pleeease "click" on his name on t...

  Another selection from John Berryman's sonnets has been long overdue.  For some background, the 115 poems, written in the 1940s a...

  I know that I am supposed to like Elizabeth Bishop (1911 - 1979) and I certainly respect her work - but she has never been appealing...

Better known for his prose and role as a high court-official in the administration of the first Ming Dynasty Emperor, Song Lian was also cha...

Sulpicia, a Roman poetess from the 1st century BCE, is only known by her name and a handful of poems included with Tibullus’.  I am includin...

This is another of the poems translated into English by Ezra Pound and Noel Stock from Italian text translated, in turn, from hiero...

This is the only translation I could find (from The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry) of Tang Wan's poem in reply to her ex-husband Lu You&...

 This is the poem that Lu You wrote forty years after the chance meeting with his beloved, Tang Wan, as described in the previous posting (N...

Lu You, one of the four great poets of the Southern Song Dynasty, was also half of one of the great Chinese love stories .  That story ...

  Li Yu, the last Emperor of the Southern Tang Dynasty, only ruled for fourteen years, but during his reign, his support of the arts made hi...

"Anonymous" has always been a prolific author across the centuries.... This one is from 16th century Korea.  Given how hand f...

  The "Nineteen Ancient Poems" are the earliest extant poems in the five-character meter that was the longest lasting form of...

An Israeli poet who immigrated to Palestine in 1935 when she was in her early twenties, Goldberg had a distinguished academic career at Hebr...

The fifth selection by Philip Larkin and the one that most disturbs the Romantic - capital "R", not lower case - in me. His place ...

  The fifth selection from cummings.  I have a concern that it may be harder to understand by someone whose first language isn't English...

With this one, I think Amichai takes the lead with most poems here....  And is it any wonder? PLEASE read some of the others and you'll ...

  Amy Lowell (1874-1925) came from a privileged and wealthy background, a true-blue "Boston Brahmin" who became an influential fig...