Poets Pick Their Favorite Love Poems

If you ask contemporary poets to pick their favorite love poems, you get ones that run from the passionate to the political.

For example, Kim Addonizio's selections include "Song of Songs, Canticle 4" and Yeats' “When You Are Old” which she confesses to first encountering "in the movie Peggy Sue Got Married, in the scene where the young wannabe Byron quotes it to Kathleen Turner’s character and then spoils the mood by quoting some of his own execrable verse. It’s a somewhat melancholy poem in the end, with its “how love fled,” but what stays in memory is the lovely assertion of a profound love that sees beyond the body."

Sharon Old has amongst her picks, “Passing Through” by Stanley Kunitz.

Joel Brouwer asks "How can anyone write a heartfelt love poem in this age of irony without seeming like a sap?" And his answer is “Windchime” by Tony Hoagland .