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Overview
"Love is a crooked thing," W. B. Yeats wrote, "there is nobody wise enough to find out all that is in it." Love includes the romance of a moment and the devotion of a lifetime, both elation and grief, the ecstasy of being together and the pain of being apart. We may (or may not) love ourselves, one another, friends, children, parents, places, things; our feelings may be simple or very complicated. "How do I love thee?" asked Elizabeth Barrett Browning. "Let me count the ways." Loving: Poetry and Art embraces the astonishing variety and complexity of love as no other book has done. Among the 100 poems and songs and nearly 90 beautifully reproduced images, we find "legendary lovers" from Adam and Eve and Romeo and Juliet to John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The lover's fascination with the beloved's beauty, the compelling thrill of first love, the perils and delights of intimacy, the special bonding that is possible for couples - all are celebrated here. Love between parents and children is reflected in the anonymous "Lady Bug" poem as well as in Sylvia Plath's intensely personal lines, while the universality of human feelings is shown in poetry about creation and spiritual love, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Glory be to God for dappled things." To create this unique and deeply moving book, Charles Sullivan has gathered outstanding examples of poetry and art from various cultures and historical periods, and presents them so that words and images go beautifully together. Here we discover or rediscover love poems by Dylan Thomas, Gwendolyn Brooks, Pablo Neruda, Robert Bly, Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes, William Shakespeare, Erica Jong, Seamus Heaney, W. H. Auden, Takasaki Masakase, Anne Sexton, Nikki Giovanni, John Donne, Walt Whitman, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, among others. Their poetry is accompanied by paintings, sculpture, photographs, and other stirring images by such artists as Chagall, Rodin, Mary Cassatt, David Hockney, Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Georgia O'Keeffe,The author of America in Poetry and Imaginary Gardens now offers a splendid collection of the world's finest love poetry and art. Among the 100 poems and nearly 90 images are legendary lovers, famous poems, paintings, sculpture, and photographs by great artists and poets.cluding 53 in full color.
Editorials
Ray Olson
An extraordinary matcher of poems and pictures--see also "Ireland in Poetry" --Sullivan here brings his skill to bear upon the most prized emotion. This is, however, no late valentine, for its contents consider the panoply of objects love can take besides a loving peer: children, kindred spirits, beauty, God, nature, even favorite possessions (e.g., Karl Shapiro's "Buick"). As for love between peers, a section entitled "Legendary Lovers" celebrates Adam and Eve, Elizabeth and Raleigh, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Yeats and Maud Gonne, the Brownings, and John and Yoko, while the poems in "Hidden Feelings" speak passions acknowledged only inwardly, whether with joy (Whitman's "Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore") or some more complicated feeling (e.g., the ambivalent ruefulness of Eliot's Prufrock). Among the other poets represented are Bishop, Millay, Roethke, Amichai, Bogan, Dylan Thomas, and Shakespeare; among the artists, Gauguin, Renoir, Michelangelo, Utamaro, Botticelli, Picasso, Warhol, Haring, Bill ("Calvin and Hobbes") Watterson, and photographers Clarence H. White and Man Ray. All told, a deeply satisfying selection.Book Details
Published
September 1, 1992
Publisher
New York : H.N. Abrams, 1992.
Pages
143
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780810935624