The Best Love Poems of All Time

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 7deadlysins

Auden's 'Tell me the truth about Love'

My boyfriend read this two me one afternoon.
It's just beautiful.

O Tell Me The Truth About Love


Some say love's a little boy,
And some say it's a bird,
Some say it makes the world go around,
Some say that's absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn't do.

Does it look like a pair of pyjamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does its odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.

Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
It's quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I've found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway guides.

Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian,
Or boom like a military band?
Could one give a first-rate imitation
On a saw or a Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like Classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.

I looked inside the summer-house;
It wasn't over there;
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead,
And Brighton's bracing air.
I don't know what the blackbird sang,
Or what the tulip said;
But it wasn't in the chicken-run,
Or underneath the bed.

Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all its time at the races,
or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of its own about money?
Does it think Patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.

:)

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It's brilliant! Thanks for posting the poem. :)

I think I will arise now and go to Innisfree, and there watch the swallows twitter.
Nine pearls and rubies will I give away there, but I will keep my fancy free.
If I had world enough and time, an hundred years would be spent on this reply.
But, at my back, time's winged chariot is hurrying near and it will not stop for me.

Do I paraphrase myself through these lines? Very well then, I do.
I am a vast, colossal wreck and I have a mind of winter, especially when I am sitting in silence listening to the frozen lake crack, pop and rumble.
I will sing praise for the bright star.
I will wish myself to be as steadfast.
Nature's eremite will guide me down the road less taken toward immortallity.

Be not proud, Time and Death.
This verse your virtues rare shall eternize, but you are already there.
Down by the sally gardens, where frost is no longer spectre gray, where spring springs from the breast of the sky, I palely loiter.
Not ancient ladies, when refused a kiss, are so far from hope and love, though the daisies spring and the butterflies flicker about.

A singing skylark lifts me up before a bawling nightingale sets me down.

To Keats, Shelley, Frost, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Yeats, Marvell, Pope, Housman, and Spenser...
Cheers!

Paul
antiaging4geeks.com

ode with a lament---- Pablo Neruda

Well, this depends on what is meant by a love poem, but here are two poems that I like which deal with love:

"Night is My Sister, and How Deep in Love"

Night is my sister, and how deep in love
How drowned in love and weedily washed ashore,
There to be fretted by the drag and shove
At the tide's edge, I lie -- these things and more:
Whose arm alone between me and the sand,
Whose voice alone, whose pitiful breath brought near,
Could thaw these nostrils and unlock this hand.
She could advise you, should you care to hear.
Small chance, however, in a storm so black,
A man will leave his friendly fire and snug
For a drowned woman's sake, and bring her back
To drip and scatter shells upon the rug.
No one but Night, with tears on her dark face,
Watches beside me in this windy place.

~Edna St. Vincent Millay

"I Thought Once How Theocritus Had Sung"

I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young;
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightaway I was 'ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,--
Guess now who holds thee?--Death, I said. But, there,
The silver answer rang, --Not Death, but Love.

~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

yes, those were very pretty, but I think that Byron's "She walks in beauty" is the all-time single best love poem ever.
just my opinion.

I will probably think of many more poems after I've posted this, but here are a few that really moved and continue to move me (in no particular order):

A Feaver, by John Donne
The Good Morrow, by John Donne
"Black absence hides upon the past...", by John Clare
Sonnet V, by Garcilaso de la Vega
Poem 20, by Pablo Neruda
Sonnet ("Largo espectro de plata conmovida..."), by Federico García Lorca
Song of the Soldier Husband, by Miguel Hernández (and many more of his)
They Flee from Me, by Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sonnet 116, by William Shakespeare
"Grieve not, dear love, although we often part...", by the Earl of Bristol
"Love's Philosophy", by P. B. Shelley

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Originally Posted by putty

I misread "love" for "loved" in suggesting Keats' Ode. With an apology I want to add that Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" should be on the list of best "love" poems.[/i]

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i like that too. okay it's not a romantic love poem but 'On A Dead Child' is nice:

http://www.poetry-archive.com/m/on_a_dead_child.html

Dissolution/fading of love:

http://www.bartleby.com/121/8.html

I'm new to this forum, but I've really enjoyed reading these poems. I didn't realize e.e. cummings had written such lovely poems; I also like the one that ends "nobody, not even the rain has such small hands."

I like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Yeats, and Neruda, and on and on. It has been fun.

I know Edna St. Vincent Millay is on here several times, and I apologize if this one has been included. It is the one that makes my throat close up and makes my heart give a lurch of recognition.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

Hi, this is my first post :)

I just read through the entirety of this thread and there are so many beautiful poems I would have picked that have already been mentioned - notably Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese No. 14, e. e. cummings' i carry your heart with me and Alfred Noyes' The Highwayman.


This poem may not be the greatest of all time, but I do have a fondness for it:

I Am Very Bothered - Simon Armitage

I am very bothered when I think
of the bad things I have done in my life.
Not least that time in the chemistry lab
when I held a pair of scissors by the blades
and played the handles
in the naked lilac flame of the Bunsen burner;
then called your name, and handed them over.

O the unrivalled stench of branded skin
as you slipped your thumb and middle finger in,
then couldn't shake off the two burning rings. Marked,
the doctor said, for eternity.

Don't believe me, please, if I say
that was just my butterfingered way, at thirteen,
of asking you if you would marry me.

BE in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are—
gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness
of sunless cliffs
And of gray waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,
the shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember thee.

Ezra Pound

I vote for two of his, but they go together so beautifully as in a "before" (perhaps when love is being anticipated), and "after" as in wisdom found when a heart is broken and trying to heal. Yeats hits it square on the head and in the heart. They are: He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, and Never Give All the Heart.

I loaned my copy out, sorry I didn't post them with my opinions. I have the first memorised, but the second not enough to post it and do it justice. They are easy to find however. Thanks and peace to us all.

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Originally Posted by qimissung

I'm new to this forum, but I've really enjoyed reading these poems. I didn't realize e.e. cummings had written such lovely poems; I also like the one that ends "nobody, not even the rain has such small hands."
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My favorite love poems are also by ee cummings.

Love Poem for Wednesday


You’re the day after Tuesday, before eternity.
You’re the day we ran out of tomatoes
and used tiny packets of ketchup instead.

You are salt, no salt, too much salt, a hangover.
You hold the breath of an abandoned cave.
Sometimes you surprise me with your

aurora borealis and I’ll pull over to watch you;
I’ll wait in the dark shivering fields of you.
But mostly, not. My students don’t care for you

{excerpt}

Imagining you my being burns more brightly, my

veins turn the night red. About my heart the armed

guardian rattles with suspicion. Has your feeling

cought sight of me down through the liberated

stars: Are you coming from unopposable space. --

Rainer Maria Rilke, Paris, May, 1913 {translated by

Edward Snow}

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Originally Posted by ;4530

This poem is one of the most widly love poems in the world, written about her husband Robert Browning.

"How do i love thee, let me count the ways"
"if god choose, i shall but love thee better after death"

just 2 lovely lines - looking the rest up on the net is worth it - i love it.

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Ahh... Elizabeth Barret Browning's sonnets are the best love poems of all time. Makes you want to fall in love all over and over again.

Erano i capei d'oro a l'aura sparsi
che 'n mille dolci nodi gli avolgea,
e 'l vago lume oltra misura ardea
di quei begli occhi ch'or ne son sì scarsi;

e 'l viso di pietosi color farsi,
non so se vero o falso, mi parea:
i' che l'esca amorosa al petto avea,
qual meraviglia se di subito arsi?

Non era l'andar suo cosa mortale
ma d'angelica forma, e le parole
sonavan altro che pur voce umana;
uno spirto celeste, un vivo sole
fu quel ch'i' vidi, e se non fosse or tale,
piaga per allentar d'arco non sana.

Francesco Petrarca

This translation is not so good but...

She let her sunlit tresses fly
tangled and golden in the air.
Unmeasurable light was in her eyes
(how fine they were!) and now that look is rare.

Her kindness showed in tender glances,
wind-flushed cheeks. At least that's how it seemed.
I was walking tinder, I took chances.
The next part might be something that I dreamed:

A fiery lightness in her bearing,
a voice that wasn't mortal — it was song,
a sort of angel presence she was wearing.

She was a thing from heaven. If I'm wrong
I'd just as soon not know.
To heal the wound you don't unstring the bow.

:) I may not get to see you often as i like Imay not get to hold you in my arms all through the night But deep in my heart I truly know you're the one that i love and i can't let you go I can't promise you the world but i can try too give you a happy life I can't promise you i'll never make mistakes But i can try the best i can I can't promise you that I'll catch you everytime you'll fall but i can try always be close by so that i can help youu get up I can't promise that our love will last forever like in storybooks but i can promise that no matter what i'll never forget the memories i made with you:)

Im not able to express my love in that mannor because in that mannor there are no words that could express my love for you, there are no sentences that are made up of words that could express my love, there are no frases that could express this undying fire and passion that i have for one very beautiful girl, there are no paragraphs, essays, comics, books, novels, or dictionaries that could express this awe powerfull connection that i have with the one girl that truley has my heart....so you ask me why i love you and in depth and this is why i cant tell you.

THE LOOK
anon

1. STEPHON kissed me in the spring,
2. Robin in the fall,
3. But Colin only looked at me
4. And never kissed at all.
   
5. Stephon's kiss was lost in jest,
6. Robin's lost in play,
7. But the kiss in Colin's eyes
8. Haunts me night and day.

Thomas Hood's Time, Hope, and Memory is pretty good. My favorite is the very beginning when he says, "Fly through the world, and I will follow thee,Only for looks that may turn back on me;"

and the end, "When thou art vext, then, turn again, and see Thou hast loved Hope, but Memory loved thee."

What We Might Be, What We Are

by X. J. Kennedy

If you were a scoop of vanilla
And I were the cone where you sat,
If you were a slowly pitched baseball
And I were the swing of a bat,

If you were a shiny new fishhook
And I were a bucket of worms,
If we were a pin and a pincushion,
We might be on intimate terms.

If you were a plate of spaghetti
And I were your piping-hot sauce,
We'd not even need to write letters
To put our affection across,

But you're just a piece of red ribbon
In the beard of a Balinese goat
And I'm a New Jersey mosquito.
I guess we'll stay slightly remote.

Yeat's Never give all the heart was not what i expected. I expected more.

Edgar Allen poe, LENORE

Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!
Let the bell toll! -a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river -
And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear? -weep now or never more!
See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!
Come! let the burial rite be read -the funeral song be sung! -
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young -
A dirge for her, the doubly dead in that she died so young.

"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her -that she died!
How shall the ritual, then, be read? -the requiem how be sung
By you -by yours, the evil eye, -by yours, the slanderous tongue
That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?"

Peccavimus; but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song
Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong!
The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside,
Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride -
For her, the fair and debonnaire, that now so lowly lies,
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes -
The life still there, upon her hair -the death upon her eyes.

Avaunt! tonight my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise,
But waft the angel on her flight with a paean of old days!
Let no bell toll! -lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth,
Should catch the note, as it doth float up from the damned Earth.
To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven -
From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven -
From grief and groan to a golden throne beside the King of Heaven."

I know it might not look like a love poem but I keep coming back to it. The is the second poem I know from him that he mentions the name LENORE with sweet remembrance. I think H emight hae truly loved a lenore (or maybe the real woman has a different name) who died.
Look at his famous poem THE RAVEN and you'll see what I mean.

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Originally Posted by learntodiscover

Edgar Allen poe, LENORE

Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!
Let the bell toll! -a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river -
And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear? -weep now or never more!
See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!
Come! let the burial rite be read -the funeral song be sung! -
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young -
A dirge for her, the doubly dead in that she died so young.

"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her -that she died!
How shall the ritual, then, be read? -the requiem how be sung
By you -by yours, the evil eye, -by yours, the slanderous tongue
That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?"

Peccavimus; but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song
Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong!
The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside,
Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride -
For her, the fair and debonnaire, that now so lowly lies,
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes -
The life still there, upon her hair -the death upon her eyes.

Avaunt! tonight my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise,
But waft the angel on her flight with a paean of old days!
Let no bell toll! -lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth,
Should catch the note, as it doth float up from the damned Earth.
To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven -
From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven -
From grief and groan to a golden throne beside the King of Heaven."

I know it might not look like a love poem but I keep coming back to it. The is the second poem I know from him that he mentions the name LENORE with sweet remembrance. I think H emight hae truly loved a lenore (or maybe the real woman has a different name) who died.
Look at his famous poem THE RAVEN and you'll see what I mean.

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Beautiful poem by Poe,,, wonder how many young wives died before his eyes other than Annabel Lee or all are the one and the same?:D

hello,

the poem is really cool. I try to find the song of that poem..

Thanks...

Hmm..indeed i'm quite torn..i hold so many close to my heart. Some that come to mind are..William Wordsworth..Emily Dickinson..Elizabeth Barrett Browning..Lord Byron..John Keats..William Shakespeare..Pablo Neruda.;)

Don't go far off, not even for a day
Don't go far off, not even for a day,
Because I don't know how to say it - a day is long
And I will be waiting for you, as in
An empty station when the trains are
Parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because then
The little drops of anguish will all run together,
The smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
Into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve
On the beach, may your eyelids never flutter
Into the empty distance. Don't LEAVE me for
A second, my dearest, because in that moment you'll
Have gone so far I'll wander mazily
Over all the earth, asking, will you
Come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

Pablo Neruda

NO SECOND TROY

by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

WHY should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

"No Second Troy" is reprinted from The Green Helmet and Other Poems. W.B. Yeats. Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1910.

I know "No Second Troy" is not a typical love poem, but the story behind it is amazing; Yeats, Maude Gonne, her husband McBride- I love it... She was violence, he detested violence, but loved her. I find it to be captivating.

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Originally Posted by Cellar Door

I know "No Second Troy" is not a typical love poem, but the story behind it is amazing; Yeats, Maude Gonne, her husband McBride- I love it... She was violence, he detested violence, but loved her. I find it to be captivating.

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Could you explain this a little better? Maude Gonne had a violent temperment; her husband McBride did not and loved her? Where does Yeats fit into this?

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Originally Posted by Jozanny

Could you explain this a little better? Maude Gonne had a violent temperment; her husband McBride did not and loved her? Where does Yeats fit into this?

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Both Gonne and Husband had violent temperaments. Their marriage failed due to domestic violence, as it is told, and I highly doubt it was her hitting him.

This from Yeats on the subject;

from Easter 1916

"This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born."

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JBI

Both Gonne and Husband had violent temperaments. Their marriage failed due to domestic violence, as it is told, and I highly doubt it was her hitting him.

This from Yeats on the subject;

from Easter 1916

"This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.

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Hmm. Yeats was something of an elision in my formative years such as yours. I never really took to him, but I never really had much enthusiasm for Irish literary traditions, and that despite Joyce. I did enjoy listening to old Celtic mythology "untainted" by Anglican penetration, and there were some interesting poems in Kinsella's anthology that used Celtic to interesting advantage, but nothing I've read of Irish authors to date has ever really won my empathy, except Swift, but to me he is about as British as they come.

I have always thought e.e. cummings wrote some very beautiful love poems

Jozanny-

I mean to say that Yeats loved Maude Gonne, even though Yeats detested violence. I suppose I should have clarified that in my post. Oops. I am a big fan of Yeats; perhaps this will clear up what I meant:




In 1889, Yeats met Maud Gonne, then a twenty-three year old heiress and ardent Nationalist.[29] Gonne was eighteen months younger than Yeats and later claimed she met the poet as a "paint-stained art student."[30] Gonne had admired "The Isle of Statues" and sought out his acquaintance. Yeats developed an obsessive infatuation with her beauty and outspoken manner, and she was to have a significant and lasting effect on his poetry and his life thereafter.[31] Looking back in later years, he admitted "it seems to me that she [Gonne] brought into my life those days—for as yet I saw only what lay upon the surface—the middle of the tint, a sound as of a Burmese gong, an over-powering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes."[32] Yeats' love remained unrequited, in part due to his reluctance to participate in her nationalist activism.[33] His only other love affair during this period was with Olivia Shakespear, whom he had first met in 1896, and parted with one year later. In 1895, he visited Gonne in Ireland and proposed marriage, but was rejected. He later admitted that from that point "the troubling of my life began."[34] Yeats proposed to Gonne three more times: in 1899, 1900 and 1901. She refused each proposal, and in 1903, to his horror, married the Irish nationalist Major John MacBride.[35]

Yeats' friendship with Gonne persisted, and in Paris in 1908 they finally consummated their relationship. "The long years of fidelity rewarded at last" was how another of his lovers described the event. Yeats was less sentimental and later remarked that "the tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul."[34] The relationship did not develop into a new phase after their night together, and soon afterwards Gonne wrote to the poet indicating that despite the physical consummation, they could not continue as they had been: "I have prayed so hard to have all earthly desire taken from my love for you & dearest, loving you as I do, I have prayed & I am praying still that the bodily desire for me may be taken from you too."[36] By January 1909, Gonne was sending Yeats letters praising the advantage given to artists who abstain from sex. Nearly twenty years later, Yeats recalled the night with Gonne in his poem "A Man Young and Old":

My arms are like the twisted thorn
And yet there beauty lay;
The first of all the tribe lay there
And did such pleasure take;
She who had brought great Hector down
And put all Troy to wreck.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WB_Yeats

That cleared up things substantially Cellar; much appreciated.

Either way though, Yeats is still one of the greatest poets; perhaps the greatest 20th century one. He seems to be the greatest first generation modernist, and was held even by them as such.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JBI

Either way though, Yeats is still one of the greatest poets; perhaps the greatest 20th century one. He seems to be the greatest first generation modernist, and was held even by them as such.

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Do you believe this or are you repeating consensus?

I am, no pun intended, handicapped in my diffidence toward the man because his reputation was fed to me rather than studied so that I could make up my own mind--and as previously indicated, *the Celtic pathos* at some point becomes belabored victimization in my sensibility. Look at the Italian approach, in comparison. Italy wraps itself up in Old World corrosion and its authors remain perfectly contented to frolic on these grounds, from Dante through Eco. Irish writers seem to demand that their hurt feelings be indulged--and I'd argue that even Joyce does not transcend this. He makes it squarely front and center of his genius. It seems only now in the early 21st century that Ireland is dusting itself off and saying to the rest of the world, "hey, we're kind of pretty, ain't we?"

I seem to derive better rewards from other sources, and that's okay.:p

I believe it - I have read over his collected poems, time after time, and am amazed on every reading. Metrically, and in terms of syntax and form, there is no match - he understands the way words work, and uses them to create deeper meanings than what appear on the page. In terms of content, his later works especially transcend his "Irishness" as you have called it, in the sense that he seems to have purged the majority of personal experience out of his work, in an (successful) attempt to make his poetry universal.

If you look into his process, you can see exactly why he achieves such effects. He used to write an average of two lines a day - that is, spend so many hours writing but two lines, then thinking over them, and revising them. With such slow care, and skill with language, it is almost inevitable that such poetic strength will emerge.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JBI

If you look into his process, you can see exactly why he achieves such effects. He used to write an average of two lines a day - that is, spend so many hours writing but two lines, then thinking over them, and revising them. With such slow care, and skill with language, it is almost inevitable that such poetic strength will emerge.

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I will take it under advisement JBI, with the caveat--(and I tried to explain this to luke, though elocution failed me to some degree)--I do not really like studying poetry while immersed in the process of publishing my own.

The only reason I've made some effort at it since *getting to know* you and quasi, in this forum, is I have not truly been working, and so what the hay:p, yet my intellect rebels, insisting that I stand on my own two feet, with perhaps muted appreciation for a spare group of *moderns* and contemporaries. Anne Sexton doesn't make me feel threatened, so I can enjoy her evocative playfulness with fairy tale, and Vassar is to some degree a spiritual sister, which is why she gets a pass. Yeats, and even to some degree his errant sympathizer Roethke, makes me feel impatient. I am actually surprised, in fact, that I came to enjoy Browning on my own, by myself, with neither the ghost of my Shakespearean or my actually deceased Jamesian guiding me through to appreciation.

I guess that's the difference - I have no ambition to write poetry in the next little while, but all the ambition to write about poetry. Either way though, if I were writing poetry still, I would probably stick to obscure multicultural sources, as that is what critics are looking for / society is looking for.