When something emerges in my life for which my realm of knowledge offers no explanation, I seek a person who has the expertise, the information, the skill that I so bitterly lack. This may sound like a platitude, and certainly it is; when an issue presents itself, we look for someone with authority on the matter. If there is a leak in my roof, I contact a carpenter. If (more like when) I forget the recipe for Swedish meatballs, I phone my grandmother. Say I have sprained my ankle, well then I limp my way over to Mount Sinai’s emergency room. But what of matters of the heart? Does anyone have any authority on the subject beyond their own experience? My mother, a therapist, my closest friends, Buzzfeed? Perhaps. 

 

In light of Valentine’s Day, a tradition filled with letters, love songs, and poems, I sought someone who could speak to me about the expression of love in literature. I found such a person in a book-clad bureau on the sixth floor of Philosophy Hall. Erik Gray is a professor in Columbia’s Department of English and Comparative Literature, whose courses include Love in Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Sonnets and Elegies. In 2018, Gray published The Art of Love Poetry, which analyzes and historicizes love poetry across the Western tradition. At last, I found my guru. 

 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

 

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The Blue and White: Can you give me a brief history of love poetry? How has love poetry evolved over time?

 

Erik Gray: One of the most surprising things about love poetry is its consistency over time. There was a very influential idea that found a new life when C.S. Lewis, in 1936, wrote a book about medieval love poetry and prefaced it with a blanket statement that said that love as we know it, and as we practice it today in our society, was invented in the 12th century, in the south of France, by these poets called the troubadours. That in other societies and in European society before the 12th century, all the things that we take as being instinctive and inherent to our experience of love—the sort of obsessive attention on the beloved, the jealousy, and all these other aspects of love—just seemed alien. It had not been thought of that this really had a beginning that then dispersed itself so successfully into our culture that we take it for granted. It was a very influential claim because it seemed so shocking. 

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But then people started to counter it and say, well actually there seems to be very similar effects in classical Arabic poetry, and actually there’s some ancient Chinese poetry that sounds very similar to love poems that are written today. And finally people were saying, well, actually Babylonian poetry—which is the earliest written poetry that we have—has exactly the same expressions of longing and commitment and inability to sleep, all the things that we associate with love. That doesn’t mean that love is experienced the same way across all times and cultures, but that there are basic elements of love that do seem to be very consistent and that have been expressed consistently in poetry. If you read Sappho, which is about as far back as you can get, you find a great deal in common with the sorts of things that people are going to be writing in Valentine’s cards.

 

B&W: Do you think love poetry influenced what we think of as love, how we define love?

 

EG: Absolutely. Well, Lewis would say that love poetry has determined everything that we think about love. Even if that is not a claim that is held up, it is still clear that a great deal of our experience of love is based on our expectations of what it feels like to be in love, and that part of the pleasure is seeing your expectations met. The same way that, when you get married, your wedding is obviously a unique moment for you, and yet people keep in the ritual of walking down an aisle and of saying certain words because part of the pleasure is seeing yourself do this thing that you’ve seen represented so many times. So the pleasure of falling in love and being in love is partly a visceral and instinctive one, and partly an acculturated one. That comes for most of us today from love stories that we see in movies, read, or see on TV. Those stories used to be told in verse—there is a direct continuity between ancient love poetry and the representation of the same emotions in narrative form—but in the end it’s all the same thing. 

 

B&W: In The Art of Love Poetry, you write that poetry is a natural outlet for erotic love because it lends itself to the paradoxical tension between public and private that is always present in love. What is it about the form of lyric poetry in comparison to other poetic and art forms that makes it so well-suited for the subject of love?

 

EG: Lyric poetry is the term that we give to what we usually think of as a poem—not a narrative, not a drama, but something that’s usually shorter and that has an intensity of expression to it. Lyric is usually associated with inner states of feeling. And yet it does have exactly that strange tension, which is that it’s an inward, sometimes a very private emotion that by the very fact of being expressed in the form of a poem takes a public form. Even if you never show it to anybody, your poem is written in language and language is something that we all share. And if it’s written in any sort of verse form—let’s say you write a sonnet that begins with “roses are red, violet are blue”—it has that public aspect of having borrowed a cultural form to it. On the one hand, that might seem like a limitation—that is to say, you don’t want your inward private feeling to be associated with something common and public. On the other hand, love for another person is necessarily a sharing of your privacy with someone else. That’s why I suggest that the form of lyric, which always has this tension, is actually apt to love, which has that same duality.

 

B&W: Given that love poetry is both directed at an individual and often published for a greater public to read, I wonder who the audience of love poetry is.

 

EG: There’s a theorist of lyric poetry named Jonathan Culler who uses the term “triangulated address” as a descriptor for all lyric poetry. Many poems have some form of apostrophe—in other words, addresses to whatever it is that they’re describing, or, even if they’re not in the second person, it’s about a subject and an object and my own personal perception in relation to that object. But [Culler] says, just by the very fact of having been written, the I-You relationship is in some ways being triangulated with an understood audience, and therefore publication is just formalizing what is already implied by the very act of composition. That triangle is in a way essential to the effect, certainly, of love poems. There are various theorists of love who say that interpersonal love between two people is in a way impossible without a third point. This doesn’t have to be a third person to mess things up and that we’re jealous of or anything like that. It can be, for instance, language itself. The fact that I am communicating with you through this poem is a marker both that we are connected because we have this poem in common and that we are separated, because if we weren’t separated, I wouldn’t have to use language at all. What invests that third point of the triangle with so much erotic power is that it is necessary to complete the circuit between you and me.

 

B&W: What do you make of the tradition of giving published poetry to a love interest? Isn’t it odd that we borrow other people’s words to convey our emotions? In your book, you write that poetry is capable of conveying universal emotion with rhythm and rhyme in a way similar to music, while expressing the individual-specific emotions so emphasized in erotic love. Is it comparable to sharing a song?

 

EG: I think it is exactly comparable to a song—songs and poetry in most languages are the same word. A great deal of love has to do with a sense of recognition. And I’ve already mentioned that the excitement of being in love is partly a sense of novelty as well as the exhilaration of recognizing in yourself what had hitherto only existed in romances. 

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But another form of recognition would be the Platonic one. In Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium, he says that we fall in love not with something that is extrinsic to us but with something that we recognize as having once been part of ourselves. And in Socrates’ contribution to the Symposium, the wise woman who is teaching him says that when you fall in love with somebody, you are recognizing in that person the absolute beauty that you have always known of, because we have a vague sense of these absolute forms, but which you only truly see when you recognize it in someone else. 

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In both cases, there’s the sense that recognition of the thing that you didn’t know you had lost, or didn’t know was within you until you saw it in another, is what makes us fall in love. We often feel that when we hear a song, or read a book of poems, or any other book, and think, “That’s it, that’s what I feel but I could never express it or I could never play the music.” It’s natural to want to give that to somebody that you are in love with because it is an expression of you that you yourself could not produce. And also because it has this triangulated sense—that if I can love this and you can love this too, then somehow we are connecting through it the same way we would connect through some other triangulated point.

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B&W: I found the fourth chapter of your book to be very interesting because you highlight the presence of animals in love poems. You write that love poets include animals “as signs of erotic uncertainty, queerness, and inconclusiveness.” 

 

EG: Animals have that quality of being both different and similar to us. I guess that’s true of anything but in animals it’s particularly striking, which is why they appeal to love poets. That is, if love has that quality of being simultaneously new, different, wonderful, and also recognizable in the way that we were just talking about, then love in animals is going to have that necessarily because they are both different from us and similar to us. So when you see pigeons cooing and billing and necking and doing funny little dances for each other, it’s beautiful because it’s reminiscent of the funny little dances that we do in our own mating rituals, and yet of course displaced into this surprising or unusual form. So that’s one way in which animals appear in love literature, specifically love poetry, as a displacement that allows us to view our own modes and feelings. 

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But then sometimes an animal can also serve as a very powerful point of triangulation. There is a wonderful poem by the ancient Roman poet Catullus about his beloved’s pet sparrow in which he focuses on her physical relationship with it, the way it jumps around in her lap and the way she feeds it and the way it nibbles at her fingers. If he’d been writing a poem directly about her lap or about how much he wants to nibble her fingers, there would be something unappealing about that. But somehow having it mediated through this figure—an animate figure and one with a personality and a will but not another human being, which would make it a very different poem, say if I were jealous of your other lover—it manages to have some of the tension of what we usually think of as a love triangle, in which there’s somebody coming between us, but nevertheless operates more like one of the other types of erotic triangles that I was mentioning, where the pleasure comes from the completion of a circuit that’s made visible for us and made complete for us by the externalizing into this third point.

 

B&W: Can the use of animals in love poetry also function as sources of inclusivity? I wonder if including animals potentially removes gender from the equation and could make the poem read as more universal.

 

EG: I think that’s a great point. And it’s true that poets will turn to natural figures like animals in order to give either specifically queer or, as you say, more universal ideas about love. The expansion of it beyond our species makes love less culturally specific, reduces constraints, expectations, and just broadens, as you rightly say, the definition and the possibilities.

 

B&W: For those of us who have not delved deep into the annals of love poetry, is there any particular poem you recommend we read this Valentine’s Day?

 

EG: No one poem will do for everybody. There is a poem by Tennyson called “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal,” a short poem that I have always found unbelievably beautiful and seductive. Back when I was first dating my wife, I thought, the moment has come. I was in England and she was in New York because I was abroad for a year. I thought, it’s Valentine’s day, I’m going to share this poem. So I texted it to her, and of course I was five hours ahead, so I did it right after I woke up, thinking she will find this when she wakes up. One of the refrains of the poem is “waken thou with me.” So I texted it and I immediately got a reply saying, “I am awake.” It hadn’t occurred to me that she would have her phone on overnight and that getting the text message would wake her up. So when I got the text message, my first reaction was thinking that I must have mistakenly texted this to the person whose name is right before hers alphabetically in my list of contacts. Which, as it turns out, would’ve been the worst possible person I could ever have texted this to. And so I panicked, but then I looked again and realized, no, it was the person that I meant to send it to. It was just that she was texting me back at what would’ve been 2:30 in the morning her time, or something like that. In the end it all worked out well and now we are happily married and live happily ever after. But that was the poem that I reserved for the special Valentine’s Day moment. And I recommend it.