Into the company of love   
it all returns.

Woo your sweetie by pairing the perfect poem with sweets, drink, and posies. The irresistible combination is sure to result in wobbly knees, a melting heart, and a very smitten beloved. From the lustful to the sacred; from Shakespeare to Gizzi, pick up a few ideas from this selection of ten poetic pairings to charm your adored one straight into your arms. Read more >

On Poems of Love
by Marilyn Hacker
Eros is often the fuel of the lyric imagination, which chooses to use words, sentences, musical structures of language to re/member the beloved, to enter that inexhaustible source of—not uniquely "carnal"—knowledge which is another person's body and mind. Read more >

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Traditional & Classic Love Poems

How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun
(Sonnet 130) by William Shakespeare
Wild Nights – Wild Nights! (249)
by Emily Dickinson
No, Love Is Not Dead
by Robert Desnos
To His Coy Mistress
by Andrew Marvell
The Buried Life
by Matthew Arnold
Sonnets on Love XIII
by Jean de Sponde
What Was Told, That
by Jalalu'l-din Rumi
Two Loves by Lord Alfred Douglas
A Ditty by Sir Philip Sidney
Answer to a Child's Question
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Definition of Love
by Andrew Marvell
She Walks in Beauty
by George Gordon Byron
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
by Christopher Marlowe
Love's Philosophy
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Look by Sara Teasdale
Song to Celia by Ben Jonson
Love by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Love in a Life by Robert Browning
A Birthday by Christina Rossetti
Meeting at Night by Robert Browning
To Anthea Who May Command Him Any Thing by Robert Herrick
Wooing Song by Giles Fletcher
Monna Innominata[I wish I could remember]
by Christina Rossetti
Monna Innominata [I loved you first]
by Christina Rossetti
Monna Innominata [I dream of you, to wake]
by Christina Rossetti
Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene III [O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?]
by William Shakespeare
Lovers' Infiniteness by John Donne
Love by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The White Rose
by John Boyle O'Reilly
Let Us Live and Love (5)
by Gaius Valerius Catullus
The Face of All the World (Sonnet 7)
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
In a Boat
by D. H. Lawrence
When You are Old by W. B. Yeats

American Classics

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond by E. E. Cummings
Lullaby by W. H. Auden
A Line-storm Song by Robert Frost
A Negro Love Song
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
It's all I have to bring today (26)
by Emily Dickinson
I Love You by Sara Teasdale
The Forms of Love by George Oppen
Who Shall Doubt by George Oppen
June Light by Richard Wilbur
True Love by Robert Penn Warren
Blue by May Swenson
Rent by Jane Cooper
The Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones: Poem # one by June Jordan
The Conjugation of the Paramecium
by Muriel Rukeyser
The Hug by Thom Gunn

Contemporary Love Poems

To Dorothy by Marvin Bell
The Kiss by Stephen Dunn
San Antonio by Naomi Shihab Nye
When a Woman Loves a Man
by David Lehman
Long Distance II by Tony Harrison
Coda by Marilyn Hacker
The Ecstasy by Philip Lopate
Epithalamium by Matthew Rohrer
Credo by Matthew Rohrer
syntax by Maureen N. McLane
It Was Raining In Delft
by Peter Gizzi
Fons by Pura López-Colomé,
translated by Forrest Gander

Read more contemporary love poems >

Elsewhere Online

"Instead of a Love Poem" by Yehuda Amichai
"In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden" by Matthea Harvey
"I Crave Your Mouth, Your Voice, Your Hair" by Pablo Neruda
"Morning" by Frank O'Hara
"Love Song" by Rainer Maria Rilke
"He is more than a hero" by Sappho
"On the Road Home" by Wallace Stevens
"Some Trees" by John Ashbery

Related Lists

Wedding Poems
Anniversary Poems
Poems of Passion and Sex
Poems about Heartache and Unrequited Love
Poems about Breakups and Divorce
Friendship Poems