Love Poems That Have Become Famous

Famous love poems fall into different groups that naturally overlap with each other.

• Love poems written by famous poets and writers
• Love poems written by people who were mainly famous for other reasons.
• Love poems that have become famous because of the quality of the writing.

The first group obviously include people who were professional poetry writers such as Dylan Thomas, Robert Burns,  Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her husband Robert Browning.

The second group were people who had become famous for other reasons would include military people like Napoleon Bonaparte, politicians such as Randolph Churchill, Kings such as Henry VII of England.

Then there are the most famous love poems that are listed here for themselves.  These love poems make us pull up sharp stop doing whatever we were doing and think about what the poet is saying.

What ever type of famous love poem you are looking for  I am sure you will be able find something suitable here in this section.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning

Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were a well known couple in Victorian literary circles. A strange match coming from very different backgrounds they eloped to get married after a lengthy exchange of letters to each other.
Many of these letters still exist and I publish some of them on our LoveLettersCentral.com site. They later settled in Florence (where their son Robert Wiedemann Barrett was born).

The Autumn,

Go, sit upon the lofty hill,
And turn your eyes around,
Where waving woods and waters wild
Do hymn an autumn sound.

The summer sun is faint on them —
The summer flowers depart —
Sit still — as all transform’d to stone,
Except your musing heart.

How there you sat in summer-time,
May yet be in your mind;
And how you heard the green woods sing
Beneath the freshening wind.

Though the same wind now blows around,
You would its blast recall;
For every breath that stirs the trees,
Doth cause a leaf to fall.

Oh! like that wind, is all the mirth
That flesh and dust impart:
We cannot bear its visitings,
When change is on the heart.

Gay words and jests may make us smile,
When Sorrow is asleep;
But other things must make us smile,
When Sorrow bids us weep!

The dearest hands that clasp our hands, —
Their presence may be o’er;
The dearest voice that meets our ear,
That tone may come no more!

Youth fades; and then, the joys of youth,
Which once refresh’d our mind,
Shall come — as, on those sighing woods,
The chilling autumn wind.

Hear not the wind — view not the woods;
Look out o’er vale and hill -
In spring, the sky encircled them —
The sky is round them still.

Come autumn’s scathe — come winter’s cold —
Come change — and human fate!
Whatever prospect Heaven doth bound,
Can ne’er be desolate.

Elizabeth Moulton Barrett (1806-61) was born in the north east of England (County Durham) the eldest of a family of 12. At the age of 32 the family moved from the open countryside to central London (50 Wimpole Street).

Although an established and famous poet even before she came into first contact with Robert Browning she wrote her most famous love poems (Sonnets from the Portuguese) some four years after their marriage (see links above).

Aurora Leigh (a love story written entirely in verse) written in 1857 was a huge success in many ways establishing Elizabeth Barrett Browning as one of the best writers of romantic love poems of the Victorian era. She was never a strong person and her health grew steadily worse before dying in June 1861.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was buried in Florence, Italy the place where the couple had made their home for many years.

Although Robert Browning (1812-89) is considered as one of our greatest Victorian romantic love poem writers in the view of many people he was never as good as his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning. A Londoner by birth (his father worked as a clerk in the Bank of England).  one of Robert Browning’s early works achieved much success possibly because they were not easy to understand so never sold widely.   After his marriage and a lack of success with several works he practically gave up writing to take care of his sickly wife.

After her death Robert Browning again turned back to writing poetry publishing Dramatis Personae (1864) was a huge success which he built on with his greatest work The Ring and the Book (1868).  None of his later books sold as well so he continued to live largely in the shadow of his late wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, until his death in the cold winter of 1889. Although Robert Browning died in Venice his body was returned to London for burial in Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey.