Love in Poetry: A Long Echo of the Soul

Cover of my unpublished book / Gabriel Ganiarov

Love in Poetry: A Long Echo of the Soul

Since the birth of the word, love has been its oldest tremor.
Sometimes I think poetry was born of a loving gesture: someone looked at another’s face, didn’t know how to say what they felt, and so invented rhythm, image, song. In that first breath of language, the world began to become human.

The Greeks understood that love was a form of knowledge. It wasn’t only a matter of feeling, but of learning beauty through desire. Plato knew it: love was the soul’s impulse toward the divine. But it was Sappho, from the island of Lesbos, who embodied that truth with her bare voice.
She did not define love; she suffered it. Her poetry was pure confession, a wound sung to the winds of the Aegean.
“It seems to me he is equal to the gods, that man who sits before you and listens to you speak so sweetly.”
There, in that shiver, the lineage of love in poetry began. Sappho taught that to love is to look with the whole body, a fusion of desire and word. And ever since, every poet has tried to repeat, in other voices, that first trembling.

The Romans inherited from the Greeks a sense of love as art and tragedy. Catullus, Propertius, Ovid wrote with the passion of one who burns knowing he burns. In them, love became play, excess, the art of seduction. Ovid cast it in his Ars Amatoria as a science of the body and of cunning, a catalog of conquest and loss.
The poet no longer implored the gods: he spoke from human experience.
Love, then, came down from the temples to the streets and began its earthly journey.

At the other edge of the world, the Chinese and the Arabs also founded their own liturgy of love. In Tang poetry, love was transparency and emptiness, a feeling sliding between the scent of tea and the fugacity of the lotus blossom. Li Bai or Du Fu wrote love as the melancholy of time: beauty was always what was leaving.
Meanwhile, in the Arab desert, Sufi poets turned love into a mystical path. Rumi, for instance, said: “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
For them, to love was the highest way of knowing God. Desire was not the enemy of faith but its mirror.
Thus, the East made passion a spiritual way, and the West, a quest for the ideal.

In the Middle Ages, love sang again, but this time from a distance. The troubadours of southern France invented the sweetest of sentences: to love without possessing. Courtly love was a moral and poetic code, a way to worship the inaccessible. The lady was the sun, and the poet, her shadow.
That impossibility turned love into perpetual longing, a flame that seeks not to consume itself but to stay alive.
Dante, in his Vita nuova, carried that flame into theology. Beatrice was not only a woman: she was the visible face of the divine. Love became symbol, a ladder toward spiritual perfection.
I have always believed that this inheritance still lives in us. Every time a poet writes about lost love, they repeat—without knowing it—the medieval gesture of adoring the impossible.

Then came the Renaissance, and love returned to the body. Petrarch looked at Laura again with human eyes. Shakespeare made love a storm and a wound. In his sonnets, love turned into a matter of contradiction:
“Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”
In that era, the poet no longer sang for commission or for virtue: he sang out of necessity. Love became a mirror of the human condition—its desire, its limit, its death.
Since then, to love and to write have been two forms of the same unrest.

Romanticism brought an emotional revolution. Love ceased to be symbol and became living flesh again.
Goethe, with his Werther, embodied the tragedy of one who loves unto suicide. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Bécquer—all understood that love was a vertigo without salvation. The beloved was no longer ideal, but abyss.
The poet became a martyr of his own feeling.
Romanticism taught us that love not only exalts; it also destroys. And from that destruction, beauty is born.
Passion became both an affirmation of life and its sentence. Every romantic verse confesses that paradox: “I love you because I lose myself in you, and because in losing myself I discover who I am.”

After the romantic splendor came disenchantment. Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud—the cursed poets looked again at love, but without innocence.
In The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire writes: “Love is a stormy sky full of lightning.” Love ceased to be purity to become mixture, corruption, flesh and perfume. It was a state of fall, but also of revelation.
In Rimbaud, love dissolves into hallucinatory vision, into the desire to transgress the bounds of reason.
In Verlaine, love is a broken echo, a music that fades with the rain.
I believe that in them love stops being hope and becomes awareness: a way of knowing oneself condemned to feel.
Since then, poetic love no longer seeks consolation, but truth. And truth—as we know—almost always hurts.

In the twentieth century, love became a shattered mirror. War, exile, modernity brought with them a new way of loving: the way of uprooting.
We no longer love as totality, but as survival.
Poetry grows fragmentary, introspective. In Alejandra Pizarnik, love is absence: “I know nothing of love, only of its masks.” In Hannie Ossott, love is journey and memory, body and echo.
In Eugenio Montejo, love becomes home again: a refuge of clarity in the midst of modern chaos.
“Every body is a word that love pronounces.”
Contemporary poets no longer speak from the altar or the abyss, but from the wound.
They know that love does not save, but gives meaning.
They know it is the only territory where language can still be human.
And yet, despite its fragmentation, love persists as the invisible center of poetry.
In modern Spaniards, from Luis Cernuda to Gamoneda, from Valente to Clara Janés, love is assumed as exploration of the self, as a way of thinking with the skin.
Cernuda said it with his exiled voice: “Where can I go that my desire will not go?”
Love became exile, but also an interior homeland.
Perhaps that is why, when we poets today write about love, we do not do so to define it, but to inhabit it.

My Word, Its Inheritance

Sometimes I think the whole history of poetry is the history of love searching for its name.
From Sappho to Pizarnik, from Dante to Montejo, the poet has been a medium of desire, a witness to the ineffable.
Love has changed faces—it has been divine, human, impossible, carnal, broken—but its core remains the same: the tremor before beauty and loss.
I write from that memory. I’m not interested in love as argument, but as revelation.
Love teaches me what reason cannot: that life has meaning only when someone speaks it from the other side of their skin.
And poetry, in that sense, is the purest form of love: loving the world with words.
When I write about love, I do not do it to console myself, but to understand the mystery of still feeling.
I have learned that love in poetry is not measured by its object, but by its intensity: every verse is an act of survival.
To love, then, is to write against death.

Epilogue: The Infinite Echo

Love has traveled the centuries, transforming with us.
It was prayer in Sappho, elegy in Petrarch, fire in Byron, abyss in Baudelaire, despoilment in Pizarnik.
But in every case, poetic love has had a mission: to remind us that we are vulnerable, that we are made of desire and loss.
And in that recognition—in that shared wound—lies the deepest communion between poet and reader.
I believe love remains the great metaphor of the human soul.
It is the mirror where all eras, all bodies, all tongues look at themselves.
When someone reads a love poem, even if they know neither the author nor the addressee, something within recognizes itself.
That is language’s victory over time: the possibility of loving again through another.
That’s why I write.
Because with every love poem, with every word given, the world becomes possible again.
Poetry—that extreme form of tenderness—is the only thing that saves us from silence.
And as long as there is a poet willing to say “I love you” in a new way, Sappho’s fire will go on burning in us.

Gabriel Ganiarov
(From the unpublished book “Essays for an Uncertain Heart”)