From the jacket of the book: "It has often been said that love, both sacred and profane, is the only true subject of the lyric poem. Nothing better justifies this claim than the splendid poems in this volume, which range from the writings of ancient China to those of modern-day America and represent, at its most piercing, a universal experience of the human soul."

An ambitious aim that I'm not sure is fully achieved. The book has 163 poems from various writers. Most poems are well known, some of them even classic. And although most lovers of poetry are already familiar with them, it doesn't diminish their impact. There are verses from Shakespeare, W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, John Donne and Christina Rossetti, just to name a few. Even if a collection like this cannot be anything but America and Britain centered, heavily focused on the 19th and 20th centuries, an effort has been made to include other writers and other eras. There are for example poems from Izumi Shikibu, Catullus, Pablo Neruda, Anna Akhmatova, Sappho, and Li Po.

The poems are arrenged into seven different categories: definitions and persuasions, love and poetry, praising the loved one, pleasures and paines, fidelity and inconstancy, absence and estrangement and parting, and love past. This demonstrates that love is a very broad subject that can cover numerous different emotions and situations. The poems therefore do not repeat the same thing over and over, but approach their subject from various different perspectives. This, with the wide range of different writers, is one of the book's major attractions. The other? It has some bloody good poetry. ( )