The students in a class I'm teaching chose one love poem each to discuss, and I left the definition of "love poem" up to them. They selected the poems from
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, which now seems to weigh about 30 pounds.
Their choices, in no particular order:
"To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship," by Katherine Philips
"Love's Growth," by John Donne
"Talking in Bed," by Philip Larkin
"Unfortunate Coincidence," by Dorothy Parker
"The Ghost in the Martini," by Anthony Hecht
"Separation," by W.S. Merwin
"The Passionate Shepherd," by Christopher Marlowe
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," by William Wordsworth
"One Flesh," by Elizabeth Jennings
"The Canonization," by John Donne
"When We Two Parted," by Lord Byron
"Whe You Are Old," by W.B. Yeats
"After Making Love," by Galway Kinnell
"Lullaby," by W.H. Auden
"Litany," by Billy Collins
"Sonnet 18," by William Shakespeare
I selected one word each from the poems and invited the students to try to write a poem that successfully incorporated all the words. Here is the list, in case you'd like to accept the challenge, too:
ask, eye, felicity, medicine, neutral, spoken, bread, satisfaction, cloud, absence, murmur, difficult, beauty, we, hold, live, delight, cold, compare, and sunlight
