Customer Reviews

Art & Love: An Illustrated Anthology of Love Poetry

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet." ~ Plato

This captivating book is all about marriage of love poetry and art treasures from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's an illustrated anthology of love poetry selected and compiled by Kate Farrell, a poet and a teacher at Columbia University. There's a corresponding work of art for every poem. There are about 140 color illustrations to feast your eyes on. You will appreciate prints and photographs, drawings, sculptures, frescoes, tapestries and paintings from Henri Matisse (Icarus, Le Coeur and Ice Floes), Claude Monet (Poplars), Vincent Van Gogh (First Steps and Cypress), Pablo Picasso (Bacchanalia), Jean Léon Gérome (Pygmalion and Galatea), William Blake (The Creation of Eve), Marc Chagall (Lovers Under Lilies), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge, color lithograph), to mention a few among the many works of art illustrated in this beautiful book.

Ms. Farrell has chosen great poems written by great poets of all-time, poems that she liked and thought others would like, poems that looked at the many sides of love and poems that reflect many moods and styles, including her very own poem, "The Double Bubble of Infinity." She divided the poems into eight sections:

1. "My-Ness" - poems about familial love
2. "Oath of Friendship" - poems about friendship
3. "Go, Lovely Rose" - poems about quest for romantic love
4. "Let Me Count The Ways" - poems that praise the beloved's inner and outer beauty
5. "The Mess of Love" - poems that speak of troubled love
6. "Yesterday He Still Looked In My Eyes" - poems about lost love and parting
7. "The Marriage of True Minds" - poems that celebrate the harmony of mature love
8. "Give All To Love" - poems about love as an idea and ideal

Some of the one hundred and fifty poets represented include the husband and wife team of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, William Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Sara Teasdale, Maya Angelou, among many others.

Some of my favorite poems are Walt Whitman's "Sometimes With One I Love," "The Spring and The Fall" by Edna St. Vincent Millay, "The Passionate Shepherd To His Love" by Christopher Marlowe, "Sonnet XVIII" by William Shakespeare, "Give All To Love" by Ralph Waldo Emerson and of course, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnet XLIII From The Portuguese."

"I love thee with the breath,
smiles, tears of all my life
And if God choose
I shall but love thee better after death"

If you love poetry and art, then this is one great book for you. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

This is my favorite book. It is one of those books that constant re-reading only improves. The poems and pictures are so well-paired that they give insight to each other. There is a poem for every feeling and kind of love. I used some of the poems at my wedding, and I will be buying it as a wedding gift for a dear friend.

This is one of my favorite books. I keep it on my
coffee/reading table. The selected art and poetry
live in complete harmony. I bought this book for
my personal use, but it would make a beautiful gift.

This book is a collection of beautiful art work and poems from the past. Very beautiful.

Today many of us write a check as a wedding gift. But often we would like to add something more personal and sentimental for the couple beginning their life together -- something they will keep and treasure long after the check has been spent. This lovely book is the gift I include with most wedding checks. It is also perfect as an anniversary gift for marriages of any number of years. The pairing of beautiful love poems, with art reproductions that relate to the theme of each poem, is perfect for these occasions.