Poetry, an art form that is\n distinguished by rhythm, rhyme, intensity\n of feeling, compression, and the use of refrains, is as old as human\n civilization. It is widely believed that poetry originated in song.\n Preliterate\n societies used poetry to tell stories, record oral history and other forms\n of knowledge such as genealogy and law. Most of the world's scriptures are\n composed of poems rather than prose.\n Poets have been writing about love from time immemorial. Their compositions,\n seeped in the many shades of love, encompass a gamut of intense bonds\n including friendship, romantic love, parental love, spiritual love, love of\n king and country, and love of nature.\n 100 Best Love Poems of All Time features some of the finest love poems\n written by masters of the form across the ages. Sappho, Horace, Ovid, Dante\n Alighieri, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne,\n Aphra Behn, John Keats, William Blake, WilliamWordsworth, Samuel Taylor\n Coleridge, Heinrich Heine, Victor Hugo, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edgar Allan\n Poe, Walt Whitman, James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Christina\n Rossetti, Kahlil Gibran, Rabindranath Tagore, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sara\n Teasdale, Sarojini Naidu, W.B. Yeats, and a host of other wordsmiths tug at\n the reader’s heartstrings in this collection.