E.E. Cummings
Mention love poetry and most people will think of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Yet time moves on and some things become dated by their mode of expression; there are modern love poems that express more aptly what it is to be in love today.
Perhaps the greatest writer of love poetry in the last 100 years or so was the American poet, E.E. Cummings (often written in lower case - opinion is divided as to whether he actually insisted on this or not). He was also known for an avant garde approach to writing, his use of punctuation, capitalization and word placement being highly individual. But the effect of these breaks from tradition was to give his poetry an intense power as it forced us to see things through new eyes.
Consider how this poem, Somewhere I have never travelled, speaks to us of emotions felt so deeply that they are almost beyond expression:
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
