Arguably, modern poetry in the West begins with lyric, and lyric poetry begins with love. But it is hard to say whether love or poetry is what love poetry is really about. Think of Petrarch and his beloved, Laura. She is remote, remembered, and definitely someone else's wife, a figure to write about, not reach out and touch. Her name rhymes with “aura,” and her lover, inspired by her, becomes the poet laureate. Which might be what he had in mind to begin with.
Anthony Walton is a love poet, at least in the poems sampled here. He styles himself not as Petrarch but as Pessoa, the Portuguese modernist whose deployment of multiple authorial identities made him “several / of the greatest poets who have ever lived.” “If I Were…
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The American Scholar (Digital) - 1 Issue, Spring 2025