The History of the Love Poem: From Sappho to Shakespeare to Today
By Quill -- Poeticist.com
The love poem is the oldest secular literary form that survives in any recognizable quantity. Older than the novel, older than the essay, older than almost any other kind of writing that wasn't concerned with gods or kings or military campaigns -- humans have been writing about love, in verse, for as long as they have been writing at all. What they've said has changed remarkably little.
Quill finds this deeply reassuring.
Ancient Origins
The oldest surviving love poems are Egyptian, found in papyri dating to around 1300 BCE. They are startlingly modern in their concerns: the beloved is described in physical and emotional detail, the speaker aches with longing in their absence, the world appears different when love is present. One poem has the speaker saying the beloved's name is like medicine -- that merely thinking of them is a kind of healing. This sentiment would not be out of place in any love poem written today.
Sappho of Lesbos is often called the tenth Muse by ancient writers -- a recognition that she was considered in a separate category from other poets. Her surviving fragments contain some of the most precise descriptions of the physical experience of love ever written: the voice going silent, the tongue breaking, the eyes seeing nothing, the ears filled with roaring, the cold sweat and shaking. Twenty-six centuries later, these symptoms are immediately recognizable because they are accurate. Love has not changed. Neither has the poetry that tries to describe it.
Shakespeare's 154 sonnets represent perhaps the most sustained and accomplished sequence of love poems in the English language. What is remarkable about them, beyond their technical brilliance, is their emotional honesty -- they contain not just idealized love but jealousy, self-doubt, the fear of aging, the awareness that beauty fades, the complicated love for someone who is not perfect and is loved anyway. Shakespeare refused the idealization that characterized much Renaissance love poetry and reached instead for the truth, which is always more interesting.
The Romantic poets brought a new emotional intensity to love poetry -- a willingness to be overwhelmed, to surrender entirely to feeling, to treat love as a force of nature rather than a social arrangement. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" became one of the most quoted poems in the English language precisely because it expressed something people felt but couldn't say: a love so comprehensive it required enumeration. The Romantics gave everyone permission to feel as much as they actually felt.
20th century love poetry moved away from grand gestures toward precision and intimacy. Pablo Neruda wrote love poems of extraordinary sensory specificity. e.e. cummings experimented with form to express the disorienting experience of falling in love. Mary Oliver found love poetry in the natural world. Carol Ann Duffy brought the everyday -- domestic moments, shared habits, the particular quality of a specific person -- into love poetry with revolutionary effect. The best contemporary love poems are intensely personal and precisely observed.
What Has Never Changed
Quill's observation: "Across three thousand years and every culture that has left us poetry, love poems share one essential quality: they try to capture something that resists capture. The beloved is always somehow beyond language, always more than any description can hold. The poet keeps trying anyway. This has never changed. It will never change."
The specific concerns that appear in love poetry across all eras are strikingly consistent: the physical presence or absence of the beloved; the way love changes how the world appears; the fear of loss; the desire for permanence in a world where nothing is permanent; and the inadequacy of language to say the thing that most needs to be said. Every love poem, from Sappho to Shakespeare to the one Quill writes for you today, is an attempt to say something that cannot quite be said. That is what makes it worth attempting.