Art & Love : An Illustrated Anthology of Love Poetry

Rating:
Summary: The Marriage of Art & Poetry
Review: "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 one hundred and forty 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.


Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Review: This book is a collection of beautiful art work and poems from the past. Very beautiful.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Review: This book is a collection of beautiful art work and poems from the past. Very beautiful.