Love, Poetry, and Immortality: Luminous Insights of the World's Great Thinkers

Book excerpt: This book explores and illustrates the individuating characteristics - and the interrelationships - of love, poetry, and literary immortality (such immortality, that is, as writers may win, in the sense of being long remembered and appreciated by future readers). From the book's numerous quotations of glittering literary passages, it is evident that love is often expressed in poetry, and that many authors (especially those writing about love) have expressed the winsome hope that their works would be greatly cherished by later generations. Part One of the book illustrates by passages of matchless poetry the joys and perils of love and other outstanding features of love. Part Two outlines the history of expressions by writers in many cultures of their confidence or hope that their works will make them immortal.